


Bend Until You Break

by DragonThistle



Series: Bend Until You Break [1]
Category: MiCoVerse (Webcomic)
Genre: Brainwashing, Child Abuse, Electrocution, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Heavy Angst, Human Experimentation, Hurt No Comfort, Medical Experimentation, Milo's Sassy Attitude, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Physical Abuse, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:33:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 40,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonThistle/pseuds/DragonThistle
Summary: Everyone says he is the son of Charles and Alice Sumney.Everyone says that he's been cursed.Everyone says they're doing what is best for him.But all Milo wants is for the hurt to stop. He wants to go home.And he wants his hoodie back.[a rewrite of the original Bend Until You Break that was originally published on tumblr in 2019]
Relationships: Jake Pierly/Sage, Milo/Suffering
Series: Bend Until You Break [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1687900
Kudos: 6





	1. The Misfortune

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Micoverse Anniversary! 
> 
> I didn't intend to post this yet, but I didn't have anything else planned for Micoversary so what the hell. This is a rewrite of the original BUYB that written in 2019, illustrated by the wonderful Mushroomminded, and published exclusively on tumblr. 
> 
> This fic contains graphic descriptions of violence towards a fourteen year old, medical trauma, brainwashing torture, and a lot of distressing situations. Please be aware of the tags and don't feel bad about not reading the fic; take care of yourself.
> 
> For the rest of you...enjoy~

“Mr. and Mrs. Sumney, you do realize what you’re consenting to by signing these forms, correct? You understand that you will be under binding contract and that this facility has the right to change this contract at will. You understand that we cannot be held liable for any permanent damage done to the subject in question. And you understand that you are forfeiting the subject’s rights to deny treatment of any kind and that attending physicians can and will use force where necessary.”

The woman on the other side of the heavy oak desk raised her eyebrows at the couple perched on matching chairs across from her. They had been holding hands the entire time she had been explaining the contract to them. Though the manner in which they did so seemed to be for show rather than out of any kind of intimacy.

“We understand,” Mrs. Sumney said softly, the barest of quivers in her voice, “We just…want our son back. Please. We just want our boy…”

“This facility is at the forefront of government sponsored paranormal research,” Mr. Sumney spoke with the expression of someone holding a lemon in their mouth, “And you were recommended very highly by some people I trust very much. We’re putting our complete faith in you and your staff.”

The woman in the lab coat nodded and closed the file that was thick with paper and legal documents, stowing it carefully in the filing cabinet behind her. Then she rose to her feet, smoothing her coat over his no-nonsense slacks, and offered her hand to the couple,

“The Facility for the Exegesis of Abnormal Realities thanks you for your compliance and cooperation. We will do everything we can to understand what has happened to your son.”

* * *

Milo was trying very hard not to lose himself completely to the gnawing panic in his gut.

He was curled up in the flat, white plastic chair of the room the nurses had herded him into, his legs drawn up to his chest, his face in his knees, and his fingers curled tightly into the stiff fabric of the hospital pajamas they’d forced on him. He felt cold and naked, too exposed without the shark hoodie that the staff had taken from him with little ceremony. No one would tell him what was going on, no one would speak to him. His throat hurt from shouting for help, for Cody, for his dads, for anyone.

The small, square room they’d locked him in—definitely locked, that heavy steel door wasn’t going anywhere—was sparse and sterile white like a hospital room. The bright overhead lights pushed away any shadows he might have been able to hide in and the dark, one-way window against one wall gave him a constant sensation of being watched. There was stiff cot near one corner with a thin blanket and a flat pillow and the chair he was currently perched on, both securely bolted to the floor. The door was weighted and didn’t even have a latch or knob on the inside, only smooth metal and a small, dark window Milo suspected was more one-way glass. The only source of air flow were two, inch thin slits on opposite walls, far away from the cot or chair. There was a square outline in the wall beside the door that was so flush against the cold white wall that Milo couldn’t even get his fingernails into the gap, and what were undoubtedly cameras were hidden under little black domes on the ceiling so Milo couldn’t see where they were pointing.

The room made him feel sick.

It brought to mind a bunch of awful sci-fi movies he’d used to watch with Cody; aliens with their guts exposed and hooked up to millions of computers. That’s probably what they were going to do to him. Cut him open until they could figure out how to put him back together the “right way”.

There was a muffled beep and the door to the room opened with a groaning hiss. Milo jumped, pressing himself against the back of the chair as if he could sink through it and escape. A stern looking woman with sharp eyes and rectangular glasses strode in, her lab coat fluttering around her legs. She was followed by four strong looking men in nurse’s scrubs and Milo shrank back even more.

“Milo Sumney, you are now under the custody of the Facility for the Exegesis of Abnormal Realities, the Testing Center of Cryptozoology, Parapsychology, and Occultology. I am Dr. Orchid Pearce and—”

“I wanna talk to my dads.” Milo blurted out, the fear evident in his voice, even with the defiant frown on his face, “Where are they? I want to see them! I wanna see my dads!”

“Mr. and Mrs. Sumney have left you in my care,” Dr. Pearce said in a cool manner, pushing her glasses up her nose, “Now, as I was saying—”

“Not those people!” Milo cut her off again, his frustration overpowering his fear, heat burning in his chest and giving power to his voice as he began shouting, “My real dads! The ones you all took me away from! Where are my dads!? Where’re Dan and Jake!? Where’s Sage!? I want to go home!”

Dr. Pearce waited for him to stop shouting before she spoke again, no sign of impatience on her face, “Daniel Fuller and Jacob Pierly are forbidden from contact of any form. A restraining order is currently being processed against them and lawyers are discussing pressing chargers of kidnapping and endangerment through supernatural means. Now,” She pressed onward, raising her voice to speak over Milo as he sputtered helplessly, “As I said, I am Dr. Pearce and I am going to be your primary physician. You have been entered into our rehabilitation program, the goal of which is to either reverse the effects of the cursed object or to erase from your memory the years spent under the supposed care of Fuller and Pierly so may adjust to your life with Mr. and Mrs. Sumney.

Your birth parents have given their written and verbal consent for the staff here to do whatever it takes to fix you. From now until the moment you step foot outside this facility, completely rehabilitated, you are forfeit any and all human rights. You are now the property of the United States government under the Supernatural Objectification Act, until otherwise released.This means,” Dr. Pearce continued, watching Milo’s jaw drop in horror, “That you are no longer considered a US citizen, nor are you classified as a human being. The law is no longer on your side. You are to comply with any and all staff members unless explicitly ordered differently. Force will be used if necessary.”

“You can’t do this…” Milo whimpered. His blood was icy slush in his veins, making him shiver, his eyes wide, the true horror of his situation starting to dawn on him at last.

“A change of clothes will be provided to you each morning or as needed. Meals will be provided three times a day and will be taken here in your room. Both clothing and food will be dispensed through the delivery shoot beside the door. You will be allowed one bathroom break in the morning, one in the evening, and at least one throughout the day as needed. You will shower every other day or as needed. You will be under guard at all times. The Facility is not liable for any permanent mental or physical damage that occurs during our program.” Her hard gaze drilled into Milo, her lips pressed into a thin line as she observed him, “Do you understand?”

Milo swallowed, his dry throat clicking, his hands shaking, “You—you can’t…do this. You can’t! I—I’m just a kid! You can’t just lock me up and—“

“Actually, according to the government, you are classified as a paranormal entity and have very few rights within our jurisdiction.” Dr. Pearce cut him off, her eyes narrowing at the hopeless fear on Milo’s face, “For all intents and purposes, Milo Sumney, you are an object of the State. A specimen. Your rehabilitation begins now. Come with us, please.” And she turned to leave with a click of her sensible shoes.

“No.”

The word slammed into the room, heavy as a rock, puncturing the air with its stubborn ferocity. Dr. Pearce stopped and half turned to stare down the teenager clinging stubbornly to the chair with white-knuckled hands. He was scowling, eyes red-rimmed with the threat of tears, a ghost of a quiver on his lower lip, looking for all the world like a toddler about to throw a tantrum. But he met the doctor’s gaze with fierce glare that burned in his eyes.

“Very well,” Dr. Pearce’s words said she had anticipated Milo’s behavior, expected it, even, “Gentlemen, if you please.”

Milo’s stubborn expression instantly gave way to one of terror as the four nurses converged on him. He screamed and kicked out at them but one grabbed his ankle and pulled, dragging him halfway off the chair before he grabbed onto it, hanging on for dear life. His free foot—bare, sockless, and cold—slammed into the nurse’s knuckles and he was released. Milo dove for the nearest opening between one of the men and the wall, vaulting over the back of the chair to escape. The nurse didn’t hesitate and jumped him, pinning him to the wall with a burly arm across Milo’s chest, the other hand pushing Milo’s face into the cold wall so the teen’s snapping teeth couldn’t get near him. Milo thrashed, kicking out and catching the guy in the thigh, the chest, his nails scraping at the exposed flesh of the man’s arms. But the man merely grunted at the pain and pressed down until Milo swore hi felt his ribs creak in protest. 

Working with the efficiency of people who knew how to handle the unruly and violent-prone, the men forced Milo’s arms into itchy sleeves with straps and buckles, pulling the excess fabric around behind his back so he was hugging himself. Realizing what was happening, Milo screamed louder and bucked in their grip, thrashing, trying to get away even as the thick leather restraints were tightened, pinning his arms to his chest. A choked noise escaped his throat, his eyes hot, a cold and desperate sensation burning him from the inside out because this couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening. This didn’t happen. This didn’t happen to real people, in real life. 

It was a nightmare and all he had to do was wake up.

Milo screwed his eyes shut, chest heaving, willing himself awake. Begging for this nightmare to vanish.

But rough hands pulled him away from the wall and set him on his feet, keeping tight grips on his upper arms as they steered him out of the room. Then it was either walk or be dragged. He stumbled along with them, head swimming but glaring with a terrified ferocity through his disheveled bangs.

They passed heavy doors similar to the one on Milo’s room and doors painted with biohazard signs and simple, plain doors with fingerprint scanners. They passed one way mirrors and branching corridors and other staff members who glanced their way but ultimately ignored them, no matter what Milo did. It was a brisk march that Dr. Pearce led them on and they soon arrived in a small room with cold tile floor and a drain in the middle. An industrial sized metal sink and steel cabinets were set against one wall, the long arm of a detachable shower head and draping hose against another. A low metal stool stood over the drain with a flimsy card table beside it. Milo thought he saw something metallic glint in the bright overhead lights on the table before the nurses forced him onto the stool. They looped straps from the legs of the stool around his ankles and cinched them tight, trapping him, immobile, more helpless than he’d ever been in his life. He glared at Dr. Pearce who was sifting through the sheaf of papers on her clipboard. She withdrew a photograph and held it out for the nurses to see.

“Our clients requested his appearance be altered as his current look is…unfit for a family of their repute. If possible, please refrain from harming the subject.”

“What? What’re you doing?” Milo stared at the doctor and then whipped his head around to gape at the nurses, “What’re you doing to me!? Hey! Hey, leggo! Ow! You’re hurting me! Stop!” One of the men snagged the piercing in his ear and he tried to pull away, only for it to tug painfully at the cartilage, “Don’t touch me, you bastards! Let go!”

“Language.” Dr. Pearce chided with her usual cold patience, “We’ll have to work on that.” She wrote a note on her clipboard as a nurse pinned Milo’s face against his hip with one hand, the other carefully unhooking the metal band from his ear. Milo whimpered as the piercing was tugged away, his ear feeling strangely light without it. 

With a bruising grip, his head was pushed down so his chin was tucked into his chest. He wriggled against the uncomfortable position, back bowed, spine straining and arms going numb where they were trapped against his chest.

“Hold still.” One of the nurses ordered and Milo stilled as he felt his long red hair being wound up into a pony tail. His heart was pounding, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what they were doing through the panic clouding his thoughts and then—

Metal sliding smoothly against metal.

A familiar snick-snack of sound.

A tug on his hair.

“NO!” 

He tried to pull away but the scissors sliced through his hair smooth as a hot knife through butter. Milo cried out, voice breaking into a sob. Why did it hurt so much? Why did he feel so violated just because they’d cut his hair? 

Then came a buzzing sound that sent lightning through his thoughts and Milo panicked, lurching on the stool and almost tipping himself over. But they grabbed a fistful of his bangs and yanked, pulling his head back down to expose the curve of his neck. And the buzzing came closer.

Milo let out another hoarse sob as he felt the electric razor drag across the back of his skull, shoring what little he had left even shorter. He squeezed his eyes shut and cried, shuddering at the feel of the electric razor, at the cold ruthlessness with which the nurses handled him. He didn’t even struggle when they straightened him up and began trimming his bangs, cutting them out of his face as ugly tears streaked over his freckles. 

When they were done and were cleaning up, sweeping streaks of fire orange into a bag to be disposed of, Milo glanced at Dr. Pearce. She was watching him with that same, unreadably cold expression. He hiccuped softly and dropped his gaze to his knees. 

He felt like his world was ending, unraveling one sorry strand at a time.

* * *

“Ness 114-A, Audio Log, Interview 1. Conducted by Dr. Orchid Pearce. Interview begins.” Dr. Pearce sat back in her seat, away from the recorder, and crossed her legs as she returned her attention to Milo, “So, Milo Sumney, how long have you been fourteen?”

Milo who had been a bit preoccupied trying to get comfortable in a chair that strapped his ankles down, glanced up at her with a snort, “Are you—wait, are you serious? How long have I been fourteen? Uh, gee, I dunno, maybe fourteen years? Some scientist you are, lady.” He shifted from left to right, twisting in his seat and making the chains hooked into the straitjacket they’d forced on him clink against the armrests of the chair. 

Dr. Pearce scrutinized him as if she were trying to decipher a text she didn’t yet understand. He matched her with a dark scowl until she glanced down at her notes,

“Hm. Your father was Charles Sumney, correct?” 

“No?” Milo was genuinely confused, “I don’t know who that is. My dad was Milo Sumney Senior. I’m Milo Sumney Junior. He died when I was four and Jake and Dan raised me.” He pressed his back against the chair, straining against the confines of the jacket as he hunched his shoulders and tried to curl in on himself, “Is this some kind of test?”

Pearce only stared at him, her gaze sharp but curious, assessing Milo as if she could simply pick him apart with a look. The cold, objectifying way she eyed him made Milo bristle, gritting his teeth and glaring at her. She blinked and Milo counted that as a victory.

“Interesting.” She said and Milo hated her for it, “What do you remember about Milo Senior?”

“Nothing.”

Dr. Pearce hummed in a way that sounded equal parts condescending and curious, the sound a person made when they were trying to put together a puzzle that was five hundred pieces large, “Pierly and Fuller didn’t tell you anything about your birth father? He was their close friend, wasn’t he?”

Some of the anger and fear seeped out of Milo’s chest, leaving a hollow pit behind that bubbled black tar up his throat and gummed up his voice, “We—um. We didn’t talk about my dad.” Echos of Jake’s painfully familiar mantra, the fuzzy static of memories layered over one another from the years of being told _we don’t talk about Milo Senior in this house_ , that desperate sensation of wanting to know more eventually bleeding out into the moments at home, the moments of Dan picking him up in a hug, the moments of Jake’s rare smile, the moments where they’d been happy and safe and warm.

Milo steeled himself, fire fueled by the strength of his family burning in his eyes, “And if you wanna know about him so bad, then why don’t you just ask my dads? Huh? I bet Dan could rip this place apart with his _bare hands_! When he comes to get me, I hope he punches you in your _stupid face_!”

The statement didn’t push the buttons he hoped it would. Instead of rising to the bait, Dr. Pearce simply uncrossed her legs and spoke into the recorder again,

“Subject appears completely ignorant of his own origins. Jacob Pierly and Daniel Fuller are known to have been fully aware of the circumstances of Milo Sumney’s disappearance and purposefully withheld the information. Whether this was out of malicious intent or not is unknown.” Her steely gaze flickered to Milo and burned against his skin, “Subject is highly uncooperative. Further conditioning will hopefully yield better results. Interview ends.”

* * *

The rest of the day—Night? Morning? He didn’t know, there were no windows to the outside.—was taken up with what could have been called doctor’s appointments. If he were anywhere normal.

They’d taken the basics from him when he’d first been brought in and stripped him of his hoodie, forced him to wear the pajama-like scrubs as they’d done a general assessment. Apparently knowing his height, weight, and the health of his sight and hearing weren’t enough though. Some staff had to pin his arm down when they drew a couple vials of blood and he thrashed something fierce when they pried his mouth open to inspect his teeth. Tissue samples, fluid samples, even some hair samples (as if they hadn’t taken enough of it away from him already). 

He was allowed a small break for lunch, a meal that consisted of a bland sandwich and celery, and then they dragged him away for more tests. 

“Blood is a strong component in magic,” Dr. Pearce told him as the nurses pinned him down to the examination table and yanked up the back of his shirt. His skin prickled against the cold, sterile air of the lab and he sent a sour glare at anyone he could make eye contact with.

“On the surface level, you don’t show any traces of magic whatsoever, which I find very curious given the nature of your curse. Anyone else might use this as grounds to prove our theories about what you are incorrect,” The doctor was walking slowly around the table as she watched Milo squirm under the grips of the nurses, “But what most people seem to forget is that magic has a tendency to cling to the bones of a subject. Blood dries up, flesh decays, but bones can remain for hundreds of years.” Milo glared at her as she passed his line of site, hissing when he felt the cold swab of a numbing agent against his lower back, “It’s essential to your rehabilitation that we discover just how deep this curse runs and what sort of ties it has made to your body. To that end,” She tilted her head a little to get a better view of what the nurses were doing,

“This may pinch a bit.”

Milo felt the thick needle slide into his skin at the base of his spine, going deeper, deeper, deepest. And he screamed.

* * *

He was allowed to rest after that. 

They mercifully deposited him back into his room, dumped him on his cot and left him there, sniffling into the white blandness. Milo pulled the blanket around his shoulders and pushed his face into the thin pillow, sucking in deep breaths and trying hard not to cry. He didn’t want to cry anymore. He wanted to get angry, he wanted to bite and kick and fight back and cause so much trouble that they would decide he wasn’t worth it and just throw him out.

But he was so scared. 

He was afraid of the clinically white halls and sterile rooms. He was afraid of the burly nurses who handled him roughly and pushed him around as if he weighed nothing at all. He was afraid of the other people in lab coats who looked at him like he was something weird and inhuman. He was afraid of Dr. Pearce and her cold, sharp eyes and the way she talked to him like he was a disobedient dog.

A soft mechanical whir and hiss of displaced air made him jerk, gaze darting towards the door, expecting to see it open. But what was opening instead was the square outline next to the door, the one that was flush against the wall and sealed. It slid open, unfolding a little ramp, and dumped a tray wrapped in plastic to the floor before closing again. Milo eyed it suspiciously before creeping off of the cot, the blanket over his head and draped over his shoulders like a thin robe. 

The tray held packaged food, held tight to the flimsy plastic by the cling film wrapped around it. Milo gingerly picked the thing up, as if he expected it to explode, and toddled back over to the cot. It wasn’t much but it was something. Dinner, he supposed. It looked like there was more food here than there had been for his lunch, at least. 

Another bland sandwich of meat and cheese, lukewarm water, a handful of dry tasting baby carrots, and some flavorless crackers. 

When he was done, he dumped the tray and cling film and empty styrofoam cup with its weak lid to the floor, glaring straight at the one-way glass wall as he did so. Then, he buried himself under his blanket as much as he could, shoved his face into his pillow, and squeezed his eyes shut.

He tried not to think of home.


	2. The First Lesson

“I thought we’d start with the basics,” Dr. Pearce said, her legs crossed as she tapped the end of a pen against her clipboard, “Gaining an understanding of the connection you share with the cursed object is essential is we are to attempt reversing it. We’ll begin with exposure tests and move on from there. Roland, are we all set up?”

“Yes ma’am,” Said the lab coated assistant standing over a couple of computer monitors, “Ness 114-B was cleared and should be here any second.”

Milo glared at the both of them and gave the straps pinning his arms to the cold, metal lab chair another vicious yank. It only succeeded in chaffing his wrists and made the back of his head thud against the thin padding on the headrest. He’d been strapped into the chair in the sterile white lab room for the better part of an hour, mostly ignored except for a few sidelong glances. He didn’t know whether he should be scared or angry so he was settling on a healthy combination of both, glaring at everyone and making growling noises at anyone who wandered too close. None of the staff seemed particularly afraid of him, if anything they just looked amused at his attempts to spook them.

He was still playing aggressive when the lab door swung open and another technician came in wheeling a sort of trolley behind them. It was a bit like one of those luggage trollies from fancy hotels with the flat bottoms and low wheels and the high arch over top. Except strung up from the arch, fabric pulled taut by industrial looking clamps and shark tail swinging free, was a familiar looking hoodie.

Milo tracked it across the room until they parked it right in front of him, locking the wheels into place so it couldn’t be accidentally bumped or roll away. He’d been feeling so exposed and naked without his hoodie and now they were teasing it in front of him, baiting him like a hungry dog. Fixated on it, he leaned forward unconsciously, straining against the straps on the chair until his fingers start going numb from lack of blood flow. 

“Gimme back my hoodie!” He barked into the stillness of the lab.

“Ness 114-A and 114-B are present in Test Lab 5 with staff in attendance for exposure testing and observation,” Dr. Pearce announced, snagging Milo’s attention.

“What the hell’s a “ness”? Like the sea monster?” He snapped, still trying to keep up the brave face, determined not to give this place more than it had already gotten from him.

Dr. Pearce looked down her nose at him, “NS,” She clarified, “Nonstandard, as in Nonstandard Entity. It’s a classification for supernatural objects that appear normal but most certainly are not. Such as yourself and 114-B. Roland, begin administering the tests, please.”

The lab assistant nodded and selected something from a table of tools nearby where Pearce was sitting. Milo watched him like a hawk, eyes narrowed, as Roland stopped beside the shark hoodie and raised a large, long-necked lighter to the hem of the blue fabric. Milo’s stomach dropped.

“No! No don’t!” He jerked against the restraints, “Please don’t! My dad gave it to me! Don’t!”

A flame popped to life on the end of the lighter with a snap and began to lick at the hoodie, fingers of orange-yellow-red curling hungrily around the bottom of the hem. Milo struggled, letting out a scream that was half in terror and half in rage, slamming his back against the chair. The fire seemed to let out a hissing laugh as it climbed a little way up the front of the hoodie, tendrils reaching out to try and make the leap to the nearby sleeve. 

“Put it out.” Dr. Pearce commanded and Roland dutifully splashed some water over the flames, putting them out and sending an acrid plume of smoke to dissipate into the ceiling. Milo twisted in his seat as another technician crouched in his way, lifting Milo’s hospital shirt and pressing latex gloved fingertips over his chest. He wanted to see his hoodie, wanted to see that it was okay, wanted to make sure they hadn’t ruined the one real thing he had left from his biological father.

“No burns or markings,” Said the person who’d been checking him over, straightening up as they turned to talk to Pearce, “No signs of external or internal damage.”

“Ness 114-B is unharmed as well,” Said Roland, dusting a streak of ashes from the fabric, “Just got really warm and sooty. So it appears at least a little flame resistant. Higher intensity might risk destroying the subject, though, so I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Give! Me! My! Hoodie!” Milo shouted again, punctuating his words by beating himself against his chair to make as much noise as possible. 

Dr. Pearce ignored him, steadily jotting away on her clipboard. She traded a few words with a nurse nearby and then turned back to Roland, giving him the nod to continue testing. 

They took to Milo’s prized possession with scissors, with a knife, with corrosive liquids. They pulled fibers from it to send it off for testing. They stitched another piece of fabric into it just to see what would happen. Milo eventually gave up screaming at them and just slumped tiredly in the chair, watching them pick at his hoodie. It made something in his chest ache like they were picking at his heart instead, tugging at pieces of himself from somewhere deep inside, drawing them out with dental picks and meat hooks. It was enough to make his stomach turn.

Milo decided, resolutely, that he would hate everyone in this place and he would hate them until the universe ended if he had to.

He hoped they’d die.

* * *

“Ness 114-A, Audio Log, Interview 2. Conducted by Dr. Orchid Pearce. Interview begins. How are you feeling today?”

Milo glared at Dr. Pearce, trying with all his might to set her on fire with his mind. His insides boiled with hatred and anger and the aching tinge of despair for the mistreatment of not only himself, but also of his precious hoodie. His stomach felt hot, acidic flames cooking in his belly, ready to spew forth the second he opened his mouth and melt the stupid doctor’s stupid face right off. His breath burned hot up this throat and out his nose as he huffed out another heated, angry snort of disapproval and ire.

“I see your temperament hasn’t improved,” Pearce observed with all the nonchalance of someone taking note of the weather, “It would benefit you to speak during these sessions. The sooner your rehabilitation is finished, the sooner you can leave the Facility.”

Milo narrowed his eyes. Dr. Pearce sighed and picked up her clipboard from the desk beside her, “Very well. I am capable of compromise. How about we play that tired game of I ask you a question, you answer, and then you ask me something? Does that sound fair to you?”

“How would I know you’re telling the truth?” Milo’s words were a challenge, hot breath hissed between his clenched teeth.

“What possible reason would I have to lie to you about anything?” Pearce responded, her eyebrow raising, “It would help neither you nor my work to lie. If I can’t answer something, I will simply tell you so. There doesn’t need to be any negativity between us, Milo. So in the spirit of cooperation, would you like to go first?”

“Can I have my hoodie back?” He blurted it out, unbidden, syllables tangled over his tongue, trying to keep back the desperation but far to eager for respite.

“I’m afraid not. It’s considered a highly dangerous and cursed object and until we can determine the exact nature of its workings, it is safest to keep you separated. Now,” Pearce patiently scribbled something onto her clipboard before she looked up at him, “Have you ever met any magical or supernatural entities?”

“No,” Milo grunted reluctantly, sour and on edge, bracing for the rug to be pulled out from under him, “Me and C—some friends went ghost hunting sometimes though. Never…never saw anything.” It hurt to admit, stung his heart in a way he hadn’t expected, and for a long moment he could only watch Pearce’s pen scratch across her notes. He thought of Cody, laughing next to him in the Parker house, that excited look of delight when they caught something perfectly for a video, that exasperated smile.

Dr. Pearce clearing her throat brought him slamming back into reality. His skin prickled under the straitjacket and he swallowed hard,

“Um. What—what other stuff do you have in here? Like, magical stuff.” It was not the question he wanted to ask. But trying to work up the courage and temper his hope to ask it was proving difficult.

“A few artifacts that need to be contained, but mostly living specimens, such as yourself,” Dr. Pearce answered. There was a glint in her eye, something eager and almost excited, if Milo thought she was capable of expressing more than a shade of dull grey, “This Facility is primarily for research but we have taken on a few cases like yours, where curses or the supernatural have warped someone’s life and those changes need to be corrected. The government would prefer the general public remain unaware of the magical. And we work to keep it that way.” Her pen tapped on her clipboard a moment as she scanned her notes, “Hm. What is your earliest memory?”

Milo shrugged, the movement awkward in the straitjacket, causing the chains to clang noisily against the chair, “I dunno. A thunderstorm? Maybe? Kinda foggy. Who remembers stuff from when they were really little, anyway?” He wasn’t looking at her now, his gaze had wandered away to stare at the carpet floor, nerves twisting his stomach into knots. He took a breath and it felt raw and thin,

“C-can I see my dads? Or—or write a letter to them? Or something? Please?”

When Pearce didn’t answer immediately, Milo chanced a hopeful look up at her, eyebrows furrowed and gaze searching. She was assessing him with that same, blank expression and Milo felt his candle of hope stutter and flicker with worry.

“No.” The candle went out with a hiss of dying flame and Milo’s entire body slumped against the weight of the word. Dr. Pearce didn’t seem to notice, “Contact has been forbidden between yourself and Mr. Pierly and Mr. Fuller. Besides, I’m sure they’re busy enough with court proceedings. It’s my understanding that your parents are pursuing several legal cases against them.” She shifted in her seat, straightening, something flickering in her steely eyes that raised Milo’s hackles,

“Is it true that you lived with a dragon?”

A cold so fierce it stole the breath from his lungs rose in Milo’s chest. He opened his mouth to deny it, to lie, to change the subject, to end the interview so no more questions would be asked. But the words were ice in his throat and he had to close his mouth to swallow them down past the rapidly cooling tar that had seared from his stomach. 

He wondered how long the Facility had been spying on his family.

“They don’t—“ His voice croaked, ached in his chest, stuck on his tongue, “They—they’re just…please leave them alone.”

Dr. Pearce wrote something on her clipboard and Milo wanted so desperately to be angry, to swear vengeance on her, to promise destruction if she or any one of her people laid a finger on his family. But fear and worry only sat in a cold boulder inside him. He hadn’t been too concerned about what would happen to his family before, but it niggled at him now. What if they put his dads or his apa in this place too? What if they hurt Jake’s heart? What if they took Sage apart? What if they made Dan cry? 

“Did you have another question or would you like to end today’s session?” Pearce’s voice brought him back to reality, as shaky and chilling as it was.

“Um,” Milo wanted to hide under his blanket for hours, his mind a slurry of disjointed fears and thoughts that wouldn’t click together right, “I didn’t…I just…um…I wanna—I wanna g-go back to my room. Please.”

Something that might have been a smile lifted the corners of Dr. Pearce’s mouth, her eyes glinting behind her glasses, “Thank you for your cooperation and polite behavior, Milo. I think that has earned you some alone time in your room. If you continue behaving, you might even earn more rewards.”

She stood and opened the door to the little interview room, motioning the nurses inside where they began to undo the chains and straps keeping Milo to the chair. As he shook the numbness out of his legs and stretched his back out, he glanced at Dr. Pearce from under his bangs. She was apparently ignoring him, jotting things down on her ever present clipboard. But before the nurses escorted him from the room, she spoke,

“You know, Milo Sumney, we have a being in this Facility that has the power to warp reality. It has a propensity towards unnecessary levels of violence and, strangely enough, mushrooms. Containing it has been a horrendous ordeal. Most of the time, I believe the creature is simply humoring us, that it could escape at any time should it desire to do so.” Dr. Pearce finally looked up from her notes, staring Milo right in the eye in a way that made him feel stripped down to the core, as if every part of him were exposed, even the parts he wasn’t aware of,

“It was regarded as the most dangerous and most mysterious being we had on site. Until you came along.”

Dread flooded Milo’s veins as the nurses marched him out of the room and into the clinically cold and uncaring halls.

* * *

Milo remembered the day they had taken him away. 

Things had been tense in the house since the two people claiming to be Milo’s parents had shown up demanding their son be returned. There had been arguments and phone calls and late nights where sleep was hard to hang onto. Dan looked exhausted and drained, his smiles hollow and thin when he forced them onto his face. Jake was at the end of his rope; Milo often caught Jake and his partner Sage whispering to one another before they’d notice him and break off their small conversation. Sage had clearly been frightened, their anxiety driving them to tears, sticking close to Jake whenever they could.

Dan came home early from work one day.

His eyes were red and his hands were shaking and he made a horribly choked noise of distress when he manage to close the front door behind him. Milo was on his feet in a second, abandoning the couch for the warmth of his dad’s side. Dan scooped him into a tight hug, crushingly tight, putting his face in Milo’s hair and trying to stop the sob that heaved his chest. Milo dug his fingers into Dan’s shirt, tried to curl into him and drive the pain away. Hurried footsteps had him twisting around enough to see Jake and Sage running into the room, their hands clasped tightly together. Sage’s furry ears were already pinned back in distress and the screen on their right, cyborg eye was flashing a caution sign of concern.

“They’re coming,” Dan’s voice sounded raw and broken and the words shook in the air. He clutched Milo a little tighter, “They’re coming t-to take—to take Milo aw—away.” Hot, fat tears spilled out of his eyes and Milo wrapped his arms around Dan’s neck. They’d have to pry them apart with a crowbar. 

Jake paled so rapidly that Milo feared he was having a heart attack. Instead, Jake took a deep breath and turned to Sage, grabbing their other hand, “You have to leave.”

“What!?” It was a sound of genuine hurt and Milo whined, shaking with his own threat of tears, “I’m not leaving you guys! You’re family!”

“Sage, they will _take you too_!” Jake’s voice was trembling, choked as he squeezed his partners hands, “If they find you here, they will take you away and—god, I can’t—we can get Milo out, but this place—I read about it and it’s not a good place! Please!”

“Apa…” Milo whimpered and Sage looked up at him, their good eye threatening tears of their own, “I don’t want you to get hurt…”

Sage made a noise like they were trying not to cry and ducked their head, pushing against Jake’s shoulder and clutching him like a lifeline. Jake wrapped his arms around them in return and Dan shuffled forward to kneel down and pull them all to his broad chest. There was a splintering there, a slowly spreading crack that prickled at the edges of their little hodge-podge family, threatening to tear them apart completely. Sage gave in and heaved out a sob, their long fluffy tail coiling around Jake’s legs and the tip brushing Milo’s face. He wove one hand into the silky purple fur, clutching it tightly, and saw Sage’s cyborg eye flashing with glitched images of broken hearts and rain clouds. 

Everyone parted enough to speak to each other and Jake cupped his partner’s face in his hands, “Stay with Dominic and Cody for now. If you need to, take some money and stay in a hotel. Or with Miranda, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” Tears were streaking in earnest down his face now, his thin frame shaking with emotion, “We’ll get through this and we’ll all be together again soon. I promise.”

“I don’t want to go…” Sage looked from Jake to Dan to Milo and back to Jake, “Fuck, this isn’t right—this isn’t fucking right! I could—“

“Sage, you can’t.” Dan spoke softly but it carried a weight so heavy that it crashed into the room with all the force of a bulldozer, “Please. Do what Jake says.”

Sage looked like they wanted to protest, but they sucked in a deep breath and nodded at Dan, “Then you’d better take care of him.” They turned back to Jake, grabbed his face and kissed him hard, “And if you don’t come back I will come get you myself, consequences be damned.”

Jake smiled, shaky and fractured, “I know.”

With a great reluctance, Sage pulled away from them. Milo let the fur of their tail slide out of his fingers. It felt like letting go of a sharp edged shard of his soul. 

“Sage.” 

They paused, waited as Jake fiddled with something on his hand, and then held it out. Sage caught in their palm and the wretched expression on their face was heartbreak incarnate. Jake’s wedding ring rested warm and heavy in their hand and Sage let out a sob that was almost a scream.

“They can’t know.” Jake whispered, “I love you.”

“I love you too.” 

Sage took one last look at them and then hurried out the back door of the house. They heard it slam shut and the house suddenly felt bigger. Emptier. 

Milo put his face into Dan’s shirt and cried. 

“Jake,” Dan said hoarsely, holding Milo as tightly as he could, “We don’t—we don’t have a lot of time. The Facility—they’re going to—“

“I know. Oh god—“ Jake pressed a hand over his mouth, leaning against Dan’s side, his entire body shaking as Dan pulled him close, “We can’t let them do this.”

“We can’t do anything to stop it right now. We tried everything.”

“Dad, what’s going on?” Milo whimpered, drawing their attention, “What’s the Facility? Why did apa have to leave? What’s gonna happen?”

“Everything’s gonna be okay, baby shark,” Jake promised with a smile that was watery and weak and even he didn’t believe in it. His hand was trembling as it pressed against Milo’s cheek, smoothed his red hair back, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

That was when the front door opened and Hell spilled inside. 

Hands grabbed Milo and tore him away from Dan. Milo screamed and clutched at his dad and Dan held onto him until someone hit him with a heavy baton on the arm, hard enough that Milo felt the strike. Dan cried out and let go, stumbling backwards into a swarming team of SWAT units. Jake was yelling something, his voice nearly lost under Milo’s wild howls, but Milo saw the uniformed officers throw Jake to the floor and pin him there with his hands behind his back. 

It was all too fast, too much, too blurry for him to really remember. 

Tears and screaming and shouting and unfamiliar hands and an unfamiliar van and sobbing, begging, pleading, retching. 

And then a nightmare that just wouldn’t end.


	3. The Awful Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying this fic, please leave a comment! It's really encouraging to get some feedback.

Milo did not behave.

He made numerous escape attempts and was constantly supervised when not in his room. He barely got more than a few steps before they grabbed ahold of him, but it was the principle of the thing. At least he knew he was causing trouble for them. 

The testing continued, along with Dr. Pearce’s interviews, and they’d added a new “rehabilitation therapy”. The therapy was brainwashing and they all knew it. Pearce and her people would wear him down with testing, exhausting him physically and mentally. Then they’d bomb him with images of the people who said they were his mom and dad, praising him every time he looked at the pictures, enforcing good behavior until he couldn’t stay awake any longer and passed out with their horrible whispers in his ears. He knew they were trying to twist him, he wasn’t stupid. But Milo would not be swayed. 

How on earth did they expect him to love these strangers when just hours earlier they had been sewing thread from his hoodie into his skin to see if it did anything? How did they think he could relax when they kept taking blood samples from him? How could they fool themselves into believing he would just give up his family—his _true_ family—at the drop of a hat?

Idiots, the lot of them.

So Milo kept trying to escape, because he didn’t know what else to do. 

He nearly broke his arm trying to stop the drawer in the wall from closing. When it had dispensed its usual tray of bland food, Milo stuck his arm into it, hauling back on it to try and keep it open, thinking maybe he could climb inside and escape. But it kept closing and he almost got his fingers snapped off had he been any slower pulling himself away from the drawer. 

Once he kicked a nurse between the legs and booked it as fast as he could down the hall. He’d been bound in the straitjacket then and it unbalanced him, sending him crashing to the floor. He’d wriggled and kicked, trying to push himself along the glossy tile, screaming in rage when one of the nurses had simply plucked him from the floor and tucked him under their arm. 

No one seemed all that perturbed by his reckless escape attempts. In fact, the more he failed, the rougher they treated him. 

It was humiliating. It was exhausting. It made his heart sick.

And it made him furious.

* * *

“We have some good news and some bad news,” Pearce said as she walked into the test chamber, a few of her lackeys hot on her heels, “The good news is that we’ve managed to determine just how deep the magic—the curse—has saturated your body. The bad news,” She paused to snap some rubber gloves over her hands, looking down her nows at Milo, “Is that it’s essentially infected every single cell.”

Milo found that he didn’t really give a shit.

To show his disdain, he wrinkled his nose, curled his lip to show his teeth, and glared with all the disgust and hatred he could muster. It didn’t feel like much, given how he was strapped into what was basically a heavy duty dentist’s chair, and it probably wasn’t all that intimidating. But it made Milo feel better so he did it. 

“Your attitude has yet to improve,” Dr. Pearce stepped forward and grabbed his chin in her hand, pinching his face painfully tight and forcing him to tilt his head back, “But since it will take a rather significant amount of time for us to work on ridding you of your curse and detaching the object’s hold on you, the decision has been made to begin your rehabilitation now.” Milo wrenched his head away from her grasp and snapped his teeth at her but Pearce had snatched her hand away. Smart of her.

“I’m not scared of you.” Milo growled, all bluster and stubbornness despite the way his heart hammered a tattoo of anxiety against his ribcage.

Dr. Pearce only looked down her nose at him, “Whether or not you are afraid is irrelevant, Milo Sumney. How you feel is irrelevant. Your only concern should be following directions. Your only goal should be complete rehabilitation and successful severance from Ness 114-B. It would work very much in your favor to forget about everything outside of the Facility and focus only on what you are told to focus on. Continuing this irrational behavior of trying to escape will only succeed in shortening the already dangerously short leash you are on. I should warn you that I have been given full authorization by the director to take any means necessary to ensure the safety of my staff.”

“Whatever.” Milo spat, slumping in the straps binding him to the chair. His gaze flickered away from Pearce to the nurses bustling about the room. A screen was being projected onto the wall in front of him and others were wheeling in monitoring equipment. A few approached him and began attaching electrodes to his temples before tightening an additional strap over his forehead to keep his head still and facing forward. 

Milo thrashed about in his binding as best he could, making things as difficult as possible for the nurses as they stuck more pads to his chest and neck. They eventually strapped him down at his waist and across his chest, rendering him nearly immobile. Milo swore so colorfully that had Dan or Jake heard him, he surely would have been grounded for the rest of his life. He might have continued to curse them had they not wedged a rubber gag in his mouth, making him choke and effectively silencing him. It did not, however, stop him from making growling noises and tugging at his restraints as best he could.

“We will be showing you a series of images,” Said Dr. Pearce, no longer looking at Milo and instead inspecting the notes on her clipboard, “Some of the images will result in a mild electrical current being sent through you—the contents of these images are things that should be avoided in the future. You will keep your eyes on the projected images. Looking away will result in an additional shock. Closing your eyes will result in an additional shock. Attempting to speak during the procedure will result in an additional shock. Begin.”

The white box projected on the wall flickered and then a picture of the man and woman who had claimed to be Milo’s biological parents appeared. Milo narrowed his eyes at the image, disgust and hatred curdling hot and sour in his stomach. Those people were not—and never would be—his family.

The image changed to one Milo knew; a snapshot from his social media of Dan making a silly face at the camera. Milo had a split second to feel a longing ache in his heart before white hot pain seared his nerves and sent him jerking in the chair. His teeth ground into the rubber gag, sparks obscuring his vision as his breath snagged on molten hooks in his chest. It only lasted for a second, a breath of a moment, but it lingered under his skin, leaving him shaking and panting for breath, dizzy with the bruised feeling of leftover pain.

It carried on like that.

Pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Sumney brought Milo brief moments of relief between fits of electrical punishments. And those punishments always coincided with pictures of people and places he loved. Pictures of Jake, pictures of Dan, pictures of Sage, pictures of Cody, of Dom, of his school, the Parker house, Dan’s extensive family, his own damn home. Each one sent a surge pain through his body, sapping him of will and strength until he could only gasp and twitch at each subsequent jolt. 

Milo wasn’t stupid. He knew what they were doing. And he refused to let it stick. He forced himself to remember how much his real family loved him, remembered Dan’s warmth and gentle giant nature, held onto Jake’s softness and the sound of his rare duets with Sage, clutched Cody’s laughter and comfortable companionship. They were his rock, his strength, his motivation to keep fighting against this stupid place. 

He would not let them be associated with pain.

Though when the shocks finally stopped and the project turned off and the nurses approached to start unstrapping him, Milo barely had the coherency left to form rational thoughts. When they tugged the gag from his mouth, his jaw ached and felt slack, his tongue lolling and drool spilling down his chin. His eyes felt bruise tired and he could hardly keep them open, his limbs weighted and distant, aftershocks still trickling through his veins to make him shiver. Sweat had soaked his shirt and the front of his pants were damp with piss but he could scarcely bring himself to care. The nurses who dragged him down the hall on his knees, one arm in each of their hands, didn’t seem to.

There was a blur of being stripped out of his dirty pajama clothes, of cold water as they briskly scrubbed him down, and then being forced into more stiff scrubs. 

Milo’s next moment of focus was that he was sprawled awkwardly on the cot in his room, gazing blankly at the wall away from the door. He was on his stomach, one leg dangling over the edge of the cot so his toes brushed the cold tile, his left arm pinned under his chest and very much numb from cut off circulation. 

He felt no urgency to move and simply lay there, crying softly into the cold room until he fell asleep and the rest of the rotten world fell away.

* * *

It was lunch and Milo was picking at the rather dry celery sticks left in his tray from his meal after a difficult session in Dr. Pearce’s office. Since his time in the electric chair the day before, he hadn’t been feeling particularly inclined to talk to her and his stubbornness hand’t earned him any favors. She had again reminded him that his behavior could make or break the level of comfort he experienced during his stay.

Milo scowled at the celery in his hand and crunched it aggressively with his teeth. Like there was anything that could make him feel more comfortable in this hell hole. He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, took another bite of celery, and wished it was a home cooked meal eaten at the dining room table rather than on a thin cot in a cold room. The chill made the chaffed raw skin on his wrists ache and left him shivering sometimes after he’d been asleep.

He was mulling over the comfort of a warm bed when the familiar _clunk-hiss_ of the door opening made him jerk his head up. He sat stiffly on his bed, ready to abandon his meal if it meant giving any incoming nurses the runaround.

A couple of the men entered the room but instead of heading straight for him, they stopped a few feet away and set up a couple of folding chairs. Then they stepped back against the wall, eyeing Milo with suspicion and tension. Dr. Pearce entered next, clipboard ever at her side, head high, looking down on him with the same cold indifference she always had. But behind were the perpetrators of Milo’s suffering. 

Alice and Charles Sumney.

Milo bristled, lip curling in a sneer that showed his teeth, and leaned away from them as they sat down in the provided chairs. Pearce remained standing between them and a little behind, overseeing the visit as the door clunked shut behind them. Milo’s eyes narrowed into angry slits, jaw clenching as he bit back a slew of insults and accusations that would only land him in even more trouble.

Alice offered a wavering smile, nervous and maybe a little frightened, but hopeful, “Hi Milo, you’re looking…well.”

“Dr. Pearce says you’ve been resisting your treatments,” Charles said abruptly and Alice sent him a fervent look.

“Yeah?” Milo snarled, scratching his fingernails over the surface of his plastic tray with a hair-raising _screeck_ of sound, “Did she tell you that she _electrocutes me_?”

“As I explained before, it’s mild shock therapy,” Pearce, keeping her eyes on Milo who was shaking with anger on his cot, “Until we are able to reverse the—“

“I’m not cursed!” Milo shouted, picking up his food tray and hurling it towards the adults. Alice and Charles flinched and Pearce quickly took a step back as the tray crashed into the tile floor, scattering the remains of his meal, “I’m just a kid with a hoodie! And I want to go home!”

Dr. Pearce pressed her lips into a thin line of displeasure, “I warned you that further bad behavior would—“

“Milo,” Charles Sumney’s voice was pleading, different from the stoicism he’d been desperately trying to uphold, “Please, we want you to come home but you…you’ve forgotten us. We’re your parents, son, we just want you to be happy with us again.”

“I was happy with my dads!” Milo’s voice broke as he screamed, tears spilling hot and fast down his face, chest heaving in a strangled breath, “I was happy with Dan and Jake and Sage and you took them away from me! You put me in here and they just _hurt me_! I wanna go home! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you I hate you I hate you!” His wild yells dissolved into broken sobs and he collapsed onto his bed, pressing his face into his hands, trying to stop himself from crying. But the dam had fallen and he could no longer contain the pain and anger and grief that chewed him up inside.

“I did warn you we had made very little progress,” He heard Pearce saying over his shivering cries, “I advise you to wait until we call on you next time. He is remarkably resilient. But this is nothing that our rehabilitation program can’t handle.”

There was the scrape of a chair, soft footsteps, and then loose but warm arms folded around his shoulders, pulling him into a tentative hug. 

Milo jolted, vision still smeared with tears as he yanked himself backwards, pushing away from Alice Sumney, who sat back on her heels to look up at him. Milo shrank back on his cot, sniffling, wiping his face and keeping a frightened and angry eye on her. He drew his knees up to his chest, bare toes curling under his bunched up blanket, his little frame shaking as a traitorous hiccup escaped him.

“I’m sorry,” Alice told him in a gentle voice, one hand resting on the edge of the cot. Milo’s gaze flickered from her hand to her face, wary but willing to listen, “I know this isn’t—this is not what any of us expected. But we are trying to help you, swee—Milo. It was unfair how we took you from Daniel and Jacob, but you need to try and understand that what they did to you was very, very wrong.”

“They didn’t do _anything_ to me…!” Milo gasped. He’d wanted to scream it, he’d wanted to let the words tear from from his throat and drag the breath out of his lungs and for them to be so loud that the sound shattered glass and made their ears bleed. But his voice was choked and strained, a shiver of air that fluttered past chapped lips and froze, cold and alone, in the white clinical room.

Alice grasped his hands in her own, looking up at him pleadingly. He wanted to yank his hands away, to put distance between himself and this intimate stranger. But the genuine warmth in her eyes made him pause—he’d seen Dan with the same look, the same love and deep care that seemed to fill a room whenever he was around his family. Whatever—or whoever—Alice thought he was, she honestly believed that what she and her husband were doing was the right thing him.

“I know you can’t remember right now,” Alice told him in a strained voice, “But Charles and I are truly your parents—your real, biological parents. Daniel and Jacob…I…we don’t know what they did to you but you should be—Milo, you’re not supposed to _be_ this way!” Tears were swelling in her eyes now and her hands were tight and shaking around Milo’s own, almost painfully so despite her age. Milo felt as though he were teetering on the edge of a vast pit, one he couldn’t see the bottom of but one he knew was filled with something suffocating and horrible, the fear of it clawing its way up the sides of the hole towards him, hungry and full of a dangerous truth. He looked into it, looked down and down and down, and saw a flash of its teeth, and the sting of its truth soured the back of his mouth.

“My dad,” Milo’s tongue felt heavy, the words were thick and felt like lead being pushed up his throat with all the effort in his body, “My dad was…your…he was your kid. You—he’s gone and you’re just trying to replace him with me and…oh…oh my god…” Milo wrenched himself away, tumbling backwards off the cot and spilling onto the floor, “Oh my god, you’re fucking _sick_! I’m not my dad!”

“Milo!” Alice made to reach for him but he backpedaled away from her, scrambling on all fours, heels sliding on the polished floor.

“Stay away from me!”

“Alice!”

The flurry of activity made his head spin, the dizziness blurring shapes together, voices incomprehensible against the ringing in his ears. Hands grabbed his arms and hauled him into the air, gripping painfully tight. The nurses pinned him onto the cot as he kicked his legs out, struggling to free himself, only vaguely aware that Dr. Pearce was ushering the Sumneys out of the room. The bright lights glinted off a shared of silver and Milo felt the pinch of a needle in his arm.

Ice in his veins.

His eyes got heavy.

And then sleep sank into his mind and pulled him under.

* * *

When Milo woke up, his mouth tasted like cotton and his stomach hurt.

He was fed, showered, changed scrubs, and then left alone the rest of the day.

A cold rock sat a dead weight in his belly, sapping his energy, making his arms and legs feel like dead weights. He spent his day laying on his side, his back to the door, staring at the wall. His thoughts tumbled over themselves in his head, confused and tangled, hurt and lost. Until they finally settled on an old friend.

The burning hatred he held for everyone in the Facility.

* * *

“Milo Sumney, get up off your bed so that testing may begin.”

“No thanks.”

“It was not an offer. Get up, now, or force will be used.”

“Okay.”

Dr. Pearce sighed impatiently and Milo watched the nurses approach from his position sprawled sideways on his cot, blanket bunched at his feet. They nurses hauled him up under his arms and set him on his feet without ceremony. He swayed a bit at the sudden vertigo, looking at the polished white tiles of his room, vacant and tired. Dr. Pearce’s shadow approached him, her practical flats barely making any noise as she drew near.

“It has been decided at that as of today—“

Milo threw himself at her with all the ferocity of a rabid animal.

He snarled, screaming, baring his teeth and lashing out at her with his bare hands. Dr. Pearce stumbled backwards and Milo collided with her, sending them both crashing to the floor. Her clipboard pressed into his chest, the plastic edge digging into his throat as he snapped his jaws at her, fingers clawing at her lab coat, at her shirt, reaching towards her face. A nurse snatched at his shoulder but, quick as a flash, Milo whipped around bit the man’s hand. Hard. The nurse pulled away with a shout of pain while other voices were barking orders.

But Milo’s fury only had eyes for Dr. Pearce. 

His mouth tasted like ash and copper, his breathing erratic and rapid, his heart straining against his rib cage as it pounded adrenaline. His entire body was numb and electrified all at once, lightning burning through his veins until it sizzled against his nerve endings and burned him to the core. All the rage, all the despair, all the loneliness and hurt, and hatred was pouring out of him in burst of feral energy. He hadn’t stopped screaming. His hands hadn’t stopped reaching for the doctor’s throat.

The nurses grabbed his ankles and dragged him backwards off of Dr. Pearce. He shrieked in rage, hands still clawing at her, nails leaving jagged runs in her nylons. Once they’d hauled him away from Pearce, the nurses pounced on him in earnest. They wrenched his arms behind his back, hauling him to his feet even as he tried to kick out at them. One them closed a hand around his neck, pinching his jaw closed so that he was seething spittle and blood through gritted teeth. Angry tears smeared down his face, his entire body writhing, heels kicking uselessly at the shins of the men who held him. Another nurse helped Dr. Pearce to her feet and Milo hissed as she straightened herself out. She looked at him with a frosty sort of anger and it clashed against the hot fire burning in his veins.

“I warned you again and again what would happen if you continued to act so rashly,” She said, never breaking eye contact with him, even as his lip curled to show his blood-stained teeth, “I think we will need to alter the security measures when it comes to your containment.” She looked him up and down, tilting her chin up so she could look down her nose at him,

“A muzzle seems like an appropriate place to start."


	4. The Exits

The silicone-rubber of the mask was pressed against his mouth and under his chin, wrapping all the way around to the back of his neck. The thick straps were tight where they connected behind his head, the one that hooked over his nose and arched over the top of his head obnoxious enough to interfere with his vision.

Five nurses had to hold him still while a sixth and seventh fastened the muzzle on him. They hadn’t been gentle about it and Milo felt the bruises forming mere seconds after they’d let him go. Of course he’d immediately tried to take the damn thing off, but the lock for the straps appeared to need a key and no amount of clawing or twisting and pulling would get the stupid thing to move. Nor was he able to wriggle out of it 

He at least made sure that it was such an ordeal to remove the muzzle for meals or tests that it took as much time as possible to get the task done at all. Milo suspected they’d started drawing lots to see who would have to wrestle him into or out of the muzzle that day and it gave him no small amount of glee to imagine their exasperation at having to deal with him. If they were going to put him through hell, then by golly he was going to _give_ them hell. 

After two days of more electrocution “therapy” and biological scans, they started leaving the muzzle on at night. 

Apparently he just wasn’t worth the time.

* * *

“Dr. Pearce, I must say that this is…this seems rather unethical.”

“I assure you that it’s for your own safety. Ness 114-A has a tendency to bite when placed in a situation he doesn’t like.”

Milo aimed a narrow-eyed glare at Pearce from his position spread eagle on a cushioned exam table. She ignored him and kept speaking with the man dressed all in black, with a long purple cloth draped over his shoulders. He looked very out of place amidst the clinical white of the Facility and its pale coats.

“Mm,” The man in black ventured closer to the table and Milo watched him warily, “Well, I suppose this is hardly a normal set of circumstances…” He turned back to Pearce, “I would appreciate it if your people remained quiet and still during the procedure; breaking my concentration has the potential to harm the subject and yourselves.”

Milo watched as Pearce ordered most the stuff out of the room, leaving only herself, her right hand man Roland, and a few nurses behind. The man in black—whom Milo now took to be a priest—began unpacking his briefcase, setting up things up on the equipment tray nearby. When he reverently lifted a sturdy silver cross out, the pieces clicked into place in Milo’s head and he felt an odd mixture of panic and curiosity fluttering in his chest. He and Cody had watched countless videos on exorcisms and seances, drinking in all the information they could, eager to see any hint of the ghosts or ghouls that were promised to them. So while he was a little bit interested to actually see one up close and personal, he was less enthused about being the subject of it.

Something must have shown on his face—or in his eyes, at least—because the priest stopped his preparations and turned his attention to Milo. He leaned over and smoothed back Milo’s short red hair in a way no one had in weeks. The gesture sent an aching warmth down to the hollow pit in Milo’s stomach and he couldn’t stop the muffled whine that clawed its way out of his throat, the noise strangled by the muzzle.

“It will be all right,” The priest said in a low but very kind and gentle voice. He kept his hand, warm and heavy, resting on Milo’s temple, “I am here to help you, my child. We will extract this demon and free you from whatever curse it has placed upon you.”

Milo shook his head, whimpering, tugging at the restraints, trying to make this stranger understand the torment he was truly in. The priest only shushed him with a gentle smile and turned back to his work. 

Nothing happened, of course.

The lights were dimmed, some candles were lit, some incense burned. Milo was splashed with holy water and spoken over in scripture and blessings, that heavy silver cross held aloft and shimmering molten in the flickering candlelight. But he felt no changes. Nothing stirred inside him, no demon spoke in tongues, his body didn’t convulse, and no one projectile vomited. It was all very anti-climactic. The priest shouted his final words and there was a hush that hung in the air, expectant and hopeful. Milo blinked, glancing around the room, having been laying perfectly still the entire time, just watching the procedure with a genuine curiosity. 

“Well,” Dr. Pearce’s voice was layered with disappointment but clearly said she hadn’t expected much, “I suppose it was worth a shot.”

The priest was bustled quickly away and Milo was hauled off the table and marched smartly back to his room for a late dinner. 

“You behaved very well today,” Dr. Pearce told him as the nurses undid the lock on his muzzle to remove it. She wasn’t looking at him, too busy occupied by making notes on her clipboard, “And just as bad behavior is punished, good behavior is rewarded. You should keep that in mind for the future. Roland, once he’s finished his dinner, please have him escorted to Test Lab 12 for a melatonin dosage and a quick brainwave study.”

Milo glared after her and her lackeys as the heavy door shut behind the tails of their lab coats. He remained standing in the middle of his room, working his jaw loose after having it cramped in the muzzle, and generally just stretching the stiffness from his limbs. Being strapped into chairs and onto tables for large chunks of the day left him sore and aching, not to mention the mind numbing boredom that came from waiting for things to happen between sessions.

The hydraulic hiss of the dispenser opening caught his attention and he watched it slide open to drop his tray of food onto the floor. He was considering how easy it would be for him to crawl through it to escape, when a squat, cylindrical container fell on top of the tray and bounced to one side. He brought both his food tray and the container back to his cot, set crosslegged, and ripped open the plastic on his tray while he examined the new container.

It was styrofoam with a plastic lid and a plastic spoon taped to the top, shallow but weighted. Once he’d pried the lid off, Milo couldn’t stop the excited noise he made around his mouthful of dry mashed potatoes.

A brownie! Just a small square, just enough for a mouthful, but it was a real, actual brownie! 

It didn’t look homemade, probably something from a package, but it smelled like chocolate and it was something sweet and special. Milo scarfed down the rest of his dinner and then carefully broke off little chunks of the brownie, rolling the taste around in his mouth, savoring it while he could. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine that he was sitting at home, spoiled with a treat on the couch because Sage was a sucker and loved sharing their baking. 

For a single moment, he could imagine that everything was okay.

* * *

They tried more rituals and exorcisms on him.

They tried ones with lots of smoke and chanting, ones with cold paint on his bare skin and the iron smell of fresh blood, ones with dancing and the clattering of bones, ones in the dark with only a flickering candle, and ones where he was blindfolded and couldn’t see but feared what he heard. They brought in experts and shamans and wise old men who asked odd questions and grabbed him as if he were a prize horse they were examining. 

None of them worked, of course, but Milo found the whole thing mildly entertaining. The eccentric nature of the people Pearce called in seemed to frustrate her. Milo’s particular favorite had been a very tall and very loud man with impossibly spiky black hair and a huge white lab coat with a flipped up collar; the man had continually interrupted Dr. Pearce with loud declarations, poked at Milo for almost an hour, and then left without having made any apparent progress whatsoever. Milo had laughed at the clear frustration on his captor’s faces and had paid for it later with some unnecessarily rough handling by the attending nurses. 

Of course, interspaced between those rowdy moments were his sessions in the brainwashing electric chair or his “talks” with Dr. Pearce. He still stubbornly refused to speak with her, keeping his mouth shut even when she tried to bribe him with more treats. Those times in her office rarely lasted more than twenty minutes at most before he was sent back to his room and left alone. Cooperating with her would do nothing for him.

The brainwashing, however, was getting harder to resist. 

Milo found himself bracing for the shock every time a picture of his family or friends appeared. And when he realized what he was doing he would begin to cry, which would blur his vision and make it impossible to see what was coming. And then they’d shock him for closing his eyes and he’d only cry harder until they had to wait for him to calm down. He never got out of those sessions early, they’d keep him there as long as they wanted, usually until he was an incoherent, drooling mess. Milo hated them more than he’d hated anyone or anything in his entire life. 

But for all the energy he wasted on hating them, it aided him very little in the long run. Except to make himself a nuisance. 

Deciding to try his own experiments, Milo stopped trying to wriggle away from the nurses when they took him out of his room. He wondered how long it would take for them to drop their guard. It was hard to keep track of time in the Facility—his days were measured by his meal times and those were hardly consistent—but after a while they stopped forcing him into his straitjacket when they took him out of his room. A while longer and they were no longer holding both his arms in death grips. This “good behavior” was rewarded with further treats; more brownies, some cookies, and once even a sliver of apple pie that was crumbly and sweet and almost brought tears to his eyes. A part of Milo wanted to foil his own experiment just to continue getting desserts.

But instead, on week whatever of his stay, when the nurses were marching him down the hall with only one hand on his shoulder to steer him, Milo bolted. He ducked under the man’s hand, skipped backwards, spun on his heel, and was gone down the hallway before anyone could even begin to grab him. He cackled behind his muzzle, tearing around a corner and crashing into a doctor in a lab coat, tipping over a cart and shattering vials of blood all over the white tile floor. Milo scrambled to his feet and launched himself out of reach again, by some miracle avoiding any broken glass as he went. 

It was a short but merry little jaunt, easily foiled by other Facility staff quickly catching on to what was happening and Milo having no idea where he was going. They cornered him against a locked door at the end of long hall, the double doors bared by an access code and keycard combination, a bright and friendly EXIT sign burning tauntingly above them. When he tried to duck past them, one of the nurses snagged a strap on Milo’s muzzle, nearly strangling him as they hauled backwards and made the damn thing dig into the underside of his chin. 

Dr. Pearce had expressed how disappointed she was and then taken away his pillow. 

Milo shouted swears into his muzzle until he ran out of energy and then sulked silently the rest of the day.

* * *

“Hello Milo, it’s nice to see you again.”

Milo didn’t say anything, simply watching Charles and Alice Sumney from his seat on a chair in one of the smaller test rooms. Pearce had said something about moving their meetings to a more “neutral” environment. Milo didn’t see how a room where he’d been stabbed in the spine with a giant needle was considered “neutral”, but here they were. At least he wasn’t strapped down, free to sit on the exam table and stare somewhat sulkily at his wanna-be parents.

Dr. Pearce was in the corner of the room, apparently ignoring everyone as she scribbled away on her clipboard. Charles and Alice were on a couple of cushy office chairs facing the exam table. They both looked a little on edge, though Alice was doing her best to hide her unease behind a smile. She was smoothing her hands over her skirt repeatedly in a nervous tic. 

“Charles and I were talking on our way here,” Alice said, her voice low but still carrying in the quiet little room, “About where we’d go and what we’d do when you’re released.”

“Awful lot of talk about grand vacations and road trips,” Charles murmured.

“Well, yes, but in the end we decided that just staying home and getting you settled would be for the best. You haven’t been home in—“ She broke off, something darkening in her eyes, as if the time that had past was only just now hitting her. But she collected herself quickly, “The point is that, whenever you’re ready, the house is cleaned up and waiting for you. And you’re welcome to stay as long as you need to.”

Milo bristled, feeling accusations and defiance swelling up his throat, ready to lash out at the adults and tell them off for the bullshit they were trying to spoon feed him. But he held his tongue, clenched his jaw, and settled for narrowing his eyes at them in a way he hoped conveyed exactly how he felt about that proposition.

“Maybe, once things have settled down, we can vacation together,” Charles spoke in the stilted, awkward manner of someone trying to steer a one-sided conversation towards a specific point. But when he put his hand on his wife’s knee and she gave him a grateful smile, the warmth in it stirred a longing in Milo’s heart, “Take a cruise around some islands, go scuba diving. I’d like to see the reefs around Australia again.”

“We’ll have to keep a very close eye on Mr. Thrillseeker if we do,” Alice’s smile had turned genuine, fond, recalling sepia warmth of old memories. She looked at Milo, beaming so brightly that he was taken aback by the affection of it, “Last time we were down there, you kept going underwater for so long that we’d thought you’d drowned!”

Milo shifted awkwardly on the exam table, crossing his arms over his chest and clenching his fingers into the sleeves of his shirt, “I’ve never been to Australia and…I don’t know how to swim.”

The heavy silence was a lead weight smashing into the polished tiled floor.

Milo and the Sumneys stared at one another with a thickening tension.

Pearce’s pen had stopped its progress across her clipboard. Whatever levity had been constructing itself haphazardly from the Sumneys lighthearted comments had collapsed into a souring pile of disappointment and hopelessness. Milo swallowed hard, the lump in his throat catching his breath as he tried to steady his fluttering heartbeat.

Why did he feel bad about upsetting them? The Sumneys had done nothing for him, nothing but force him into this place of pain and torture, nothing but tear him from the people who cared about him and loved him. So why did he feel so ashamed by the heartbroken expressions on their faces? Were the brainwashing sessions actually working? He screwed his eyes shut, tears threatening to burn down his cheeks, confusion and horror and fear creating a snarled knot in his mind. He tried to speak but only managed a strangled whimper, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes to try and keep it all inside him.

“Milo,” Alice Sumney said softly, “Milo, please look at us.” He shook his head, sucking in breaths a little too quickly, dangerously close to the threshold of hyperventilation.

“Do you remember Tack?” Charles spoke up, his voice stronger and steadier than his wife’s but Milo still remained firmly hidden behind his shaking hands, “Our little Italian Greyhound? You _loved_ Tack. You were so good with him, you played together all the time, chased each other around the yard. When you were little, you wanted matching Christmas sweaters for you and Tack.”

Something was building in Milo’s chest, something undefinable, something that felt like it was clawing its way out from the depths of his aching heart.

“But he got old.”

Don’t.

“Just like all living things do, he got so old and tired. He wouldn’t run anymore.”

Please, don’t.

“And you were too little to really understand when he had to be put down. But you seemed to get the gist of it because it…when we buried Tack, you couldn’t stop crying.”

Milo felt the thing inside him scratching its claws up his throat and he clenched his jaw shut, trying to push it back down with all his might. He couldn’t understand what it was; something that ached with the pain of an open wound, deep and seeping, something that twinged with the old sting of healing scars being picked at over and over again, never able to heal and always freshly opened. It made his stomach hurt and his head throb and his eyes burn. His mouth tasted sour and his skin prickled, sweat flushing his back in heat and a chill making him shiver.

“We got another puppy afterwards, a couple of months later when it look liked you’d healed. But you never bonded the way you did with Tack.”

“Stop…” Milo croaked, a whisper strangled by emotion. Damp trails slid from between his fingers and dripped down his wrists, “I don’t—you’re just making s-s-stories—stop, just—“ His breath hitched, caught on the jagged thing trying to climb out from inside him,

“I wanna g-go back to my room. Please. I wh-wanna g-go bha-back. I wanna go back…”

* * *

Pearce told him she was very proud of his good behavior and his display of manners. She gave him back his pillow and even let him have an extra blanket. It was bribery, in a way, but the comfort and weight of the heavier blanket was worth it. 

Milo hid from the prying eyes of the cameras in his room and sniffled into his muzzle. Even with tears on his face and snot streaming from his nose, they’d still forced it over his head. He’d struggled a little, but hadn’t given them nearly as hard of a time as he usually did. He just didn’t have the energy for it. Or the heart to put into it. 

His stomach hurt something fierce.

A stabbing pain like it was being shredded on the inside, like someone was taking it in their hands and squeezing it. It made his head throb and his bones ache and made the back of his throat sting with the sour threat of bile. Milo wasn’t sure if he actually wanted to throw up or not. If he did it with the muzzle on, he’d probably suffocate, choke to death on his own vomit and wouldn’t that just be a way to go. Sure would spite Pearce to have her favorite pet project die because of a stupid stomach bug. 

Milo chuckled weakly only to have the sound trail off into a whimper as his stomach twinged in pain again. He wrapped the blankets tighter around himself and shoved his face into his pillow, squeezing his eyes shut and wishing for some peace for once. 

He dozed like that, a bundle of blankets and anxiety, until they came to take his muzzle off for dinner.


	5. The Weakness

Milo woke up with a headache pinching at the back of his skull, his mouth dry and his stomach still upset. He picked at his breakfast and offered little resistance when the nurses came back to strap his muzzle back on, only trying to push away from them until one of them grabbed a handful of his hair to hold him still. 

The queasy feeling clung to him like static all day. It made him stumble on his feet and drained his energy until he struggled to keep his eyes open. The headache had graduated to a pounding stab of pain behind his eyes and in his temples, one that flared into blinding agony under the bright lights of the Facility. Nausea clenched his stomach and had him nibbling disgustedly at his lunch before he pushed it aside in favor of a short lived nap. 

Dr. Pearce was curious about his bout of illness and ran him through a gambit of medical tests. They checked his temperature (which was a bit higher than normal but nothing alarming), took more blood samples, did x-rays, and even tried to coax him into an MRI machine, but when the noise made his headache so bad he began retching and crying, they gave up and pulled him out. They were no more gentle with him than they had been before, their bruising grips building onto the aching joints he was already collecting, but they were watching him carefully, as if waiting for him to finally splinter and break, waiting for something to happen.

That evening, Milo threw up what little dinner he’d eaten onto the floor of his room.

It was mostly stomach acid and saliva and it burned down his throat, choked and stung and brought fresh tears to his eyes. His head was a dull roar of agony, the room spinning underneath his hands and knees as he heaved and threw up again. He was still coughing and shivering when the nurses hauled him up off the floor and carried him into another room. They didn’t strap him down but the weighted blanket they put over him was too heavy for him to move in his weakened state anyway. His eyelids fluttered and he must have dozed off at some point because when he opened his eyes again, Dr. Pearce was in the room.

“—not running a fever,” One of the nurses was explaining to the doctor as she consulted a sheaf of papers in her hands, “His temperature is a few degrees higher but nothing that should warrant this kind of behavior. The symptoms are more similar to an addict going through withdrawals; shakes, vomiting, loss of appetite, dehydration, migraines. But his screens came back clear when he was admitted and he’s not on any medication.”

Pearce hummed and leaned over to get a better look at the papers, “Interesting. I have a working theory but it may require some unique and long term testing…” She looked up and met Milo’s blurry gaze, her brow only slightly furrowed as if this were merely a puddle on the sidewalk she had to step around to reach her destination. Milo dazedly searched her expression for something that resembled even a shred of empathy.

He found none. 

“Did you purposefully ingest any foreign material, Milo?” Dr. Pearce asked in a tone that said she very well knew he had not, “Is this some kind of countermeasure to stop your rehabilitation? Are you doing this willfully?”

Milo blinked slowly, his eyelids felt gummy and sticky, thoughts mixing together in his pounding head until they became a slurry of incomprehensible sensations. Longing wrenched his heart out of place and he parted cracked and dry lips and wheezed,

“Want…my hoodie. I want…my dads…my apa…please…wanna go home…”

Pearce looked at him, stoney faced, unmoved by his pleas,

“Quarantine him. Until we know what we’re dealing with, we don’t want to risk this potentially spreading through the Facility. Everyone in a mask and gloves, no skin to skin contact. All testing and rehabilitation is on hold until further—“

The door to the room opened and a nurse wheeled in a tray with a very familiar hoodie laid flat upon it, the tail curled up carefully so it didn’t dangle over the edge. She looked startled to find other people in the room and might have asked what was going on had every other nurse and doctor—including Pearce and her sidekick Roland—not set upon her in a flurry of activity.

“What are you doing here!?”

“Why’d you bring that thing out of containment!?”

“Didn’t you get the memo?”

“We sent a notice—“

“—the subject is ill—“

“—shouldn’t be here—“

“You need to leave—“

“—disciplinary acts—“

The second the hoodie had entered the room, Milo’s glossy eyes had fixed on it. He wanted it back. And he wanted it back badly. It was the only thing he had left of his birth father, the only thing he had left of the outside world, of his home. It was a part of him.

The hoodie was Milo as much as Milo was the hoodie.

No one noticed Milo squirm out from underneath the weighted blanket, the handful of people too busy arguing amongst themselves to pay him any mind. He landed awkwardly on the floor, nearly toppling over, shivering in the chilled air as he caught himself on his hands. He crept around the group of five or six adults blocking the door with their bickering, keeping them in the corner of his eye—but he really only had eyes for his hoodie. His skin itched for its comfort and warmth and when his fingers brushed the surface of it before he pulled it off the cart, he almost sobbed in relief.

It looked immaculate.

Despite the tests it had gone through, despite that Milo knew for a _fact_ they had cut a square from one sleeve some weeks ago, it still looked as clean and whole as it had the day they had dragged him into this hell hole. Milo didn’t care, not really. His only concern was that he _had his hoodie back_. He pressed his face into the fabric and allowed himself to cry, relief flooding through his aching body like a balm, soothing and wonderful and familiar in its comfort. He sank to his knees on the cold tile floor, wrapping his arms around his precious hoodie, and cried into the soft fabric. A heaving sob shook his body, choked off as he tried to keep himself quiet, tried to make this moment last because who knew how long it would be before he would have it again.

That was when someone pulled at the hoodie.

They had noticed his transgression.

They were trying to take it away from him.

Milo wanted to scream but the noise that came out was a strangled whine. He jerked his head up, pleading through watery eyes at the blurry figure trying to take his hoodie away from him. When they didn’t let go, Milo bit them and kicked his feet until his heels hit their legs. They released the hoodie with a yelp and he backpedaled into a corner, banging into a steel cabinet and bruising his shoulder.

“Don’t take it away!” His voice cracked, a fresh wave of tears spilling down his face as he clutched desperately at his hoodie, “Please don’t take it! Please! I want to keep it! Please don’t take my hoodie! Please! I need it! Please, please, please! Plleeaasshhaas-s-sahhaa!” His words dissolved into broken, blubbered screaming, his fingers curled so tightly into the faded blue fabric that his hands were shaking and his knuckles were white. The only anchor he had left in the insanity his world had become.

It was only when he’d stopped sobbing long enough to take a breath that he heard Dr. Pearce speaking,

“—in a quarantine room until further notice. Once he’s calmed down, he can be moved there with Ness 114-B. For the time being. It seems to be doing him some good. We’ll reschedule his rehabilitation after the new tests tomorrow. Any questions?” Her question was met with silence from the staff around her, “Good. Roland, stay here with Ness 114-A and B. We’ll contact you when the room is ready. Everyone else, you know what you’re assignments are.”

And quite suddenly, Milo was alone with Roland. 

The man leaned against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. Milo watched him, tears still clinging to his lashes, hiccups of tiny sobs shaking out of him every couple of breaths. Roland mat his gaze and sighed,

“You know things would be much easier for you if you just cooperated.”

Milo glared at him but, like his boss, Roland was unperturbed by Milo’s hostility. He only snorted and rolled his eyes,

“If this were a movie,” He said, pushing himself off the wall and approaching Milo with a leisurely, unimpressed stroll, “This would be the part where I talk about my kids and how fond of them I am, how you remind me of them, or some other kind of Hallmark bullshit.” Roland crouched on his heels, arms slung over his knees, sneering at Milo as the teenager curled protectively around his hoodie,

“But this isn’t a movie and I don’t have kids and you’re hardly human anyway. So this is me being nice and telling you now that if you don’t get your act together, you’re going to be in a living hell.”

It was Milo’s turn to scoff, lip curling in a snarl at Roland, still shivering as a few stray tears escaped down his cheeks, “This place is already hell.”

“You think this is bad?” Roland got to his feet, looking down at Milo the same way someone would look down at an ant on their kitchen floor,

“What’s coming will make you wish you were dead.”

* * *

Milo was moved to a new room, deeper in the Facility, with transparent walls and reinforced beams of black metal. The bed that was tucked into one corner was low to the floor—too low to crawl under—and bolted down, there were cameras in all four corners, and the room itself was smaller than his old one. The new cell was in the middle of a larger room, polished white and set with steel tables and computer stations and glossy cabinets. Anyone in the outer room had a complete view of Milo no matter where he went.

They’d replaced his muzzle but let him keep his hoodie. His death grip hadn’t loosened and his fingers were starting to ache but he didn’t want to let go of it. He was afraid that the second he let go of it, they would whisk it away and he would never see it again. So he clutched it to his chest, settled on his stiff bed, and watched the nurses and white coats mill about outside his room with anger and trepidation. 

Roland’s threat still stung in the back of his mind and settled a cold fear in the pit of his stomach. 

Not for the first time, Milo wished for his family. He wished for comfort and hugs and warm hands holding his, he wished for softly sung songs and brilliant smiles and muffled laughter, he wished for things to be soft and kind and loving. 

He wished for home. 

* * *

The testing and brainwashing picked up again a day later, when it was clear that whatever was making Milo ill had passed. 

They also took his hoodie away again.

Milo almost wanted to be sick again just so he could have it back. And possibly throw up on one of the staff. 

Hours of testing turned to days. 

When Milo started getting sick again, Pearce started doing exposure testing with his hoodie. He was allowed to be within viewing distance but not touch it at first and that was a kind of agony all on its own. When that obviously didn’t help, he was allowed to hold onto it, but only for a few minutes. These kinds of tests were eventually added to his routine, seeing how long he could go without his hoodie before he started getting sick again and seeing how long it took him to feel completely better. 

Dr. Pearce and her team seemed to site this as proof that the hoodie had supernatural properties that were affecting him. Milo argued that it was homesickness and that they were constantly taking away the one thing he had left so of course it was going to upset him. None of them were impressed, or even seemed to listen to him. 

“Where did you get the hoodie?” Dr. Pearce asked during one of his sessions with her.

“I told you already, from my bio dad.” Milo said in a tired voice, “And no, I don’t know where he got it from so _please_ stop asking me.”

Pearce scanned him with her cold eyes and he watched her incredulously, slouched against the restraints of the chair and his straitjacket. His stomach gurgled unhappily and he grimaced; it had been a while since they’d let him have his prized possession. 

“You have been acting very compliant lately,” Dr. Pearce finally broke the silence, flipping up a few pages on her clipboard, “And while this is no doubt due to the fact that you have been having limited contact with the object attached to your curse, you were promised rewards for your good behavior. We’re willing to accept any request you have—“

“I want to see my dads!” The desperate hope in Milo’s voice would have broken a weaker soul.

But Dr. Pearce, it seemed, did not have a soul, because she shook her head, “Absolutely not. Mr. Fuller and Mr. Pierly are currently spending time in a county prison while their charges are processed. Your parents no longer want you in contact with the men who—“

“They didn’t do _anything_ to me!” Milo screamed, lurching against the restraints. The chains on his straitjacket pulled taut with a jarring clang, “They raised me! They’re my dads! They took care of me! Those—those other people—the ones who took me away—the ones who had me put in _here_! I don’t even _know_ them! I don’t have any memories of them! I’ve never met them before!”

“They are you biological—“

“THEY’RE NOTHING TO ME!” 

Milo’s voice cracked, ringing through the small office. And, for once, Dr. Pearce was silent. Milo seethed at her, chest heaving with each gasp of air. He was tired and sick and weak, bruised and battered and terrified. But he was still fighting. He was still fighting because no one else was here to do it for him. No one else was here to support him. And he’d be damned if he let these smug assholes win.

“I see,” Said Dr. Pearce after a very long moment of hostile silence, “Perhaps we have been too complacent with you, given your recent good behavior. I think we might need to remind you who is in charge. You actions how consequences—“

“Fuck you.”

_“Language_ , Milo Sumney. I won’t tell you again,” A bit of tension actually entered Pearce’s voice, a frown creasing her forehead, and Milo felt a small bubble of satisfaction for getting a rise out of her, “I believe adjustments need to be made to your testing schedule. You are hereby band from physical contact with Ness 114-B until further notice.”

If she was going to say anything else, it was promptly lost under the furious scream that tore itself free from Milo’s chest. It was a guttural sound, feral and angry and terrified and all the foul things that had been coalescing inside him day after day after day. It was a wordless scream that stretched his jaw and made Pearce flinch in her seat.

He screamed until his lungs hurt and his throat ached and his eyes were watering. He screamed until the sound was choked off by a watery heave for breath. 

Then he threw up on Pearce’s carpet.

Something dark dribbled out of his mouth after the acidic saliva and the leftovers of his last meal, and Milo thought that he’d managed to actually cause some internal damage to himself. Maybe he was actually bleeding on the inside. He didn’t have long to hang onto the thought because the nurses came swarming into the room and pricked him with one of those damnable needles.

Milo still kept kicking and screaming until the drugs grabbed his mind and dragged him into a deep and unwanted slumber.

* * *

Testing slowed down after that disastrous interview. But it didn’t stop. And Milo hardly had the energy to fight them anymore.

He still tried, of course. Once, when they were trying to draw some blood from the crook of his elbow, he jerked his arm away in a spasm that tore the needle through his skin. It ripped the blood vessel open and sent a torrent of blood splattering over the attending nurses. Milo had cackled in a sort of frightened hysteria as they had scrambled to patch him up.

His favorite tactic was to just go absolutely boneless, to make himself deadweight at the most inconvenient times, usually catching anyone near him off guard. The nurses would be escorting him to another room, holding onto the straps of his straitjacket, and he would suddenly just drop. It wouldn’t do much apart from making the nurses stumble and drag him the rest of the way while they cursed him under their breath, but it was the principle of the thing. 

Milo spent a lot of his time in his new room, glaring out of the transparent walls at the scientists who were clearly talking about him in the room beyond. He’d pace his cell for almost an hour or so before an unusual level of exhaustion settled into his bones and forced him back onto his bed. He would lay there the rest of the day, eyes lidded, breath hot against the inside of the muzzle, his limbs heavy and his stomach churning. Lately, after a long day of tests and aggravation, heat prickled his skin and left him shivering without his blanket—which he’d lost for misbehaving again. When food came, he barely picked at it, taking careful sips of the water before pushing it all away and laying down again. Sickness was chewing on his joints again, leaving him tired and achey. 

He must have looked as bad as he felt because when Alice and Charles Sumney were permitted to visit him again, both of them looked visibly distressed by his appearance. He groggily hoped they felt like shit for doing this to him.

“Wh…what is that thing…on his face…?” Alice’s voice was a little fuzzy through the speakers the staff used to give him orders, but the distress was clear in her tone.

“A muzzle,” Dr. Pearce said shortly, “He has a tendency to bite. We’re working on that.”

“A _muzzle_!?” Charles repeated, a clear picture of horror on his features as he stepped closer to the wall. Milo, who was sprawled across his bed, shivering in exhaustion and sickness, only starred listlessly, watching and quiet. Charles met his eyes and for the first time, he finally looked as if he understood what was happening, “I know you said he was volatile but this—this seems a bit excessive!”

“I assure you, Mr. Sumney, it’s completely necessary,” Pearce was staying back, leaning against the edge of a table, “On more than one occasion, he has broken skin and caused my staff members to bleed. He has a propensity towards violence and escape attempts; his reckless behavior is a risk to himself and to the staff.” She didn’t look the least bit bothered by the mortified expression on Charles’ face as he gaped at her, “If it’s any sort of consolation, we have begun isolating the connection between your son and the cursed object. After a few more significant tests, we should be able to work on reversing the damage that’s been done to him.”

“Dr. Pearce, I could forgive the electroshock therapy,” Charles Sumney was clearly struggling to keep his voice even, his clenched fists shaking at his sides, “And the isolation. But this…this is too much. He’s a _child_. And you’ve muzzled him like an animal! Look at him! He looks sick!”

“It’s part of the—“

“He’s covered in bruises and cuts and he looks like death warmed over!” Charles was nearly shouting, closing the distance between himself and Dr. Pearce with the stride fo a man who had a lot of power and knew how to use it, “This is _not_ what we agreed upon! This is appalling and dangerous and frankly irresponsible! I hope you have a decent team of lawyers, Orchid Pearce, because you’re going to need them!”

Milo had been watching this tirade with a furrowed brow and a cocktail of confusion and distrust. Charles Sumney looked genuinely angry and upset at the situation. But that couldn’t be right because Charles and Alice had put Milo in the Facility in the first place; all they wanted was the perfect little boy who could replace the son they’d lost. They didn’t _actually_ care about Milo or what he wanted or how he felt so long as they got what they came for.

A movement at the wall caught his eye and he shifted just enough to see Alice Sumney slowly making her way around the perimeter of his cell. She had a cellphone in her hand and was aiming it into the enclosure, shooting anxious glances at Pearce and Charles’ spat as she went. Milo rolled over to watch her approach the corner his bed was tucked against, his eyes tired but curious as she crouched down to be more level with him.

She pressed one hand against the wall, fingers splayed, her eyes swimming with tears as she looked at Milo. 

Milo glanced between her and her phone for a moment, tried to understand the desperation in her face. His hands were shaking and his mind was a slurry of disconnected thoughts, his body shuddering as it refused to listen to him. He felt like he was spiraling slowly out of control, the aching sickness spreading through him like a a black ink stain hungrily consuming the pure white of an unblemished paper. Milo tried to roll over, to raise his hand to where Alice still had hers against the wall, to do anything to let her know how badly he was hurting. 

But once again his weakened body betrayed him.

His stomach roiled and heaved and Milo, realizing what was about to happen, jerked up in his bed. He clawed at the muzzle with shaking fingers, clenching his jaw shut, trying desperately to swallow down the sensation rising in his throat. Tears were blurring his vision, his breathing rapid as the taste of bile and acid burned in mouth. 

What followed wasn’t pretty.

Milo tumbled off his bed, pulling at his muzzle, choking and coughing and desperate to get a breath as vomit oozed out the sides of the thick silicone mask. It clogged his mouth and nose, sending more heaving shudders through his body.

He couldn’t breathe.

He couldn’t _breathe_!

The shouting from outside his cell was distant, the pounding feet of the nurses was muffled thunder, and he barely felt their hands on him as they struggled to free his face. When the muzzle finally clattered to the floor, Milo sucked in a desperate breath and threw up again, water and spit and stomach acid splattering the polished tile and stinging his hands. Dark strands of ropey ooze clung to his chapped lips and dribbled into the sick spreading across the floor as he gasped for air. 

When it was over, he cried. 

No one held him, no one smoothed his hair, no one rubbed his back and told him it would be okay, no one sang to him, no one hugged him. 

They cleaned him up, gave him clean clothes, some water and applesauce and bread, and put him right back in his room. They’d polished the floor and returned his blankets to him and the air reeked of disinfectant. 

At least they didn’t put the muzzle back on.

As he settled into. his blankets, grateful for the extra warmth, he glanced at the transparent wall beside him. The lights in his room were off, the ones beyond dimmed just enough to see by, like a nightlight, and in them he could just barely make out Alice’s handprint still left on the glass. Milo stared at it for a long moment, contemplating what had happened that day.

Then he rolled over and, fully aware that his every move was being watched, pressed his palm against the smooth surface of the wall, right where Alice’s hand had been. The glass was ice cold on his skin but he left his hand there for several long moments before he tucked it back under his blankets.

He hoped she understood.


	6. The Sudden Truth

Milo’s yells and curses were muffled by the muzzle they had replaced on him that afternoon. He bucked and squirmed as much as he could on the exam table, frightened by this sudden change of procedure. Afternoons were supposed to be his talk sessions with Dr. Pearce. Afternoons were not supposed to find him bound with thick straps that pinched his hips and shoulders and bit into his collar bones, the ones on his wrists and ankles rubbing skin so raw it threatened to break and bleed. His chest was bare, pads stuck to his skin to monitor his hear rate, gooseflesh prickling across his shivering and struggling form. 

“Preparing for nonstandard extraction.” Roland announced, stepping up beside the table. Milo’s narrow glare turned into one on wide-eyed fear when he saw the needle in the man’s hand. It was nearly as long as Milo’s forearm and twice as thick as normal needle. There were odd symbols seared into the length of the needle, swirling and complex patterns that looped into one another with a Lovcraftian madness. 

Milo screamed behind the muzzle as he watched the needle draw closer. His chest was heaving with strangled breaths, head spinning, panic seizing his entire body. The heart monitor beeped rapidly in his ears, drowning out the rest of world as it announced his terror.

The thick needle slid into his abdomen, a stinging bite of pain that he distantly thought should have hurt far more than it did. Milo wanted to look away but he couldn’t tear his gaze off the way the needle slid deeper inside him. He kept expecting to feel it puncture something, kept expecting to feel a tear as it ripped into his stomach or tore open his liver. Tears smeared his vision and he blinked them away, terrified of what was happening, but too sickened by the greater fear of not knowing.

The needle pricked something inside him; he felt it like a finger prodding at his thoughts. It made his mouth taste sour and his stomach burble with the threat of sickness.

Roland began pulling the plunger back, dragging something out of him. He could feel the tug, the gentle draw of it from deep inside him, expected to see the syringe filling with rich, red blood.

It wasn’t blood.

Blood wasn’t black like that.

It didn’t catch the light with iridescent violet shimmers like an oil slick in the sun.

And it certainly didn’t bubble and thrash like a living thing inside the confines of a syringe, ropey tendrils latching briefly onto the inside of the container before folding back in on itself.

It looked like it was alive.

Milo’s head spun and frozen needles of ice clogged his veins. His breathing was coming in short, rapid bursts as panic clawed into his chest. He felt like his throat was closing up, like the entire room was tilting and rocking, spinning out of control. It was like the bottom of the world had dropped out from underneath him and he was hurtling through a dark and empty void, strapped to a table, helpless and alone.

That was _in him_.

Whatever that was, it was _inside his body_.

Milo’s eyes rolled back and he fell unconscious with the voices if the nurses and the singing of the heart monitor serenading him into darkness.

* * *

Nothing was the same after that.

* * *

He was left alone for several days, hardly seeing any of the staff except for meal deliveries or if they swept through to check something on the computers around the outer room. Most of them wouldn’t even look at him anymore. Neither Pearce nor Roland had shown their faces since—

Since that _thing_ had shown up.

And that was perfectly fine with Milo. He was too rattled to do much of anything, apart from mechanically pick his food or slump listlessly on his cot. He must have been in shock because his mind seemed to refuse any understanding of what had happened to him. It shrank away from the memories like a cowering animal, a sense of revulsion clouding his ability to form coherent thoughts and sending a bolt through him that told him to run as far and as fast as he could. But there was no where to go.

Never in his life had Milo experienced such a prolonged sense of fear. It clung with sticky tar fingers to his mind, jarring him awake in the middle of the night with muscle seizing terrors painted across the backs of his eyes. It made his breath short, his lungs cramped against the walls of his narrow ribcage, struggling to expand against the steel beams of panic wrapped around them. His weight was dropping at a drastic rate; food wouldn’t stay down because the idea of _feeding_ whatever it was that was inside him made him wretch. Worse still were the phantom sensations that left him cold and shuddering—the feeling that something was wriggling underneath his skin, twisting amidst muscle fibers and chewing on his already fraying nerves. Sometimes he felt like if he put a hand on his stomach, he would feel it move, a thick ropey worm coiling beneath his touch and burrowing away deeper inside him.

Milo let out a choked whimper, pressing his hands over his eyes. He was curled under the blankets on his cot, hiding from the world, from the prying eyes of the cameras and scientists and the people who’d wronged him. His heart ached for home so hard he thought it would break, shatter to pieces in his chest and all of the tiny little shards of it would cut him to ribbons until he bled to death. It ached so much his scattered and restless mind wondered if this was what it felt like when Jake had a heart attack. 

And then he would inevitably think of home and it would hurt all the more.

He wanted to be back in that two story house on the little suburban street. He wanted to be among shark posters and scuffed baseboards and two cars in the driveway. He wanted a well loved guitar that was always hung on the wall but was never dusty. He wanted sketchbooks left on the coffee table with half finished drawings and eraser shaving in the carpet. He wanted tourist trap keepsakes and tiny snowglobes on special shelf well out of reach. He wanted late night texting and sneaking through windows and flashlights in the dark.

He wanted Dan to pick him up like he weighed nothing and spin him around into a bear hug.

He wanted Jake fretting over him and holding his hand even though he was a teenager.

He wanted Sage absently braiding his hair and fussing with his hoodie strings until they were even.

He wanted Dom asking if they wanted pizza for dinner and teasing them with anchovies he’d never order.

He wanted Cody lighting up in excitement as he talked about ghosts.

He wanted normal. He wanted safe.

Milo wanted to go home. More than anything in the world, he wanted to go home.

* * *

They were in one of the smaller testing rooms, with Milo sitting crosslegged on the exam table, blinking sluggishly at the quiet bustle of the couple of nurses that were nearby. Pearce was checking her clipboard and Roland was near the door, arms crossed and staring at the floor, his brow furrowed. It was the first time he’d seen either of them since they’d drawn that goo stuff out of him and they’d barely spoken a word in front of him. It made him uneasy. 

Milo’s stomach grumbled and everyone glanced at him. The attention made him shrink a couple of inches, dropping his gaze to watch his fingertips pick at the hem of his pants. His meals still weren’t staying down very well, if one could even call them meals with how little he tended to eat. The lack of food left him sluggish and shaky, often tired with a dull ache in his stomach. But no matter how much he wanted to eat, he just couldn’t bring himself to do much more than nibble a few bites. Inevitably, he would think of a viscous black worm coiling around inside him and he would retch and either shove his food away, or throw up what he had managed to eat. 

It had been a rough couple of days.

The hem of his soft pants were still keeping his attention when the door to the room opened and a couple of the nurses backed in with a cart. On the cart was his hoodie. 

Milo stared at it, expecting the joyous rush, the elation, the need, that desire to have it in his hands to flood adrenaline through him. Instead, he felt an unpleasant lurch, like something sliding sideways in the universe, a piece falling out of place. The want was more of a hunger, a frustrated haze and the desire to bite and claw until he got his way. The ferociousness of it felt almost alien, like someone else’s angry thoughts oozing into the crevices of his mind. Milo wrapped his arms around his stomach and clenched his jaw, watching the proceedings around him warily. 

Dr. Pearce finally looked up from her precious clipboard, her expression serious but something triumphant in her eye that set Milo on edge, “Ness 114-A, aka Milo Sumney, given recent events it is my duty to inform you that you are hereby stripped of all rights. You are no longer considered a citizen of the United States, but a foreign entity of unknown status to be contained and studied. You are considered property of the Facility. You are also considered a danger to yourself and others. You are no longer classified as human and you will never leave this Facility again.”

Horror could not begin to describe what Milo was feeling.

He stared at Pearce as she continued to explain how the current working theory was that his hoodie had planted a magical parasite inside of him and how that alone was grounds to revoke any right to a normal life he might have had. Milo felt cold, numb, hollowed out and scraped raw by icy metal tools and uncaring strangers. He wanted to cry, to scream, to rage, but only felt a void in his chest, echoing with Pearce’s damning words. His limbs were concrete and his mind was blank. He was porcelain, ready to crack and fracture at the lightest of touches, so fragile and unbalanced and cold. And utterly and completely alone. 

“—referring to as Ness 114-C.” Pearce’s voice dragged him sluggishly back into the present, his vision fuzzy with disassociation and his unblinking stare, “All rehabilitation has been cancelled and from now on, you are going to be a part of our research program. What this means, Subject One-One-Four, is that you no longer have the protection of your biological parents to hide behind. This Facility can and will punish you however my staff sees fit. As long as you are alive, your physical condition remains almost entirely in the hands of how you choose to conduct your behavior. Do you understand?”

Milo’s mouth worked but no sound came out. He wasn’t even sure if he was still breathing or if his heart was still beating. Maybe this was what being in shock was like.

“I think it gets it,” Roland sneered, standing up straight as he pushed himself off the wall. He looked hideously triumphant as he moved to stand beside Pearce, “It knows where it belongs. In a cell, in here, under watch. Where it can’t infect anyone else.”

Pearce glanced at her cohort, opening her mouth to speak, when a strained whisper interrupted her,

“I’m not…”

Everyone looked at Milo.

He was still sitting cross-legged on the exam table, his hands spilled loosely in his lap, his wide eyes dull and empty as they pinned Roland to the spot. It looked as if he had hardly moved.

“What was that?” Roland challenged, taking a step closer.

“I’m not…don’t call me…”it”.” Milo said hoarsely, his voice strangled and barely louder than a whisper, a wheezing breath dragged reluctantly out of his chest.

“As far as we’re concerned, that’s what you are,” Roland countered, tilting his chin up, “An “it”. A host for some kind of dangerous curse parasite. That makes you _not human_.”

“F-fuck you,” Milo said and then a manic kind of grin split his face, tears finally welling in his eyes, “Fuck you! Haha! Fuck! You!” He cackled, eyes still wide, tears rolling down his cheeks, his chest heaving between hysterical laughter and mad sobs, “F-fucking—hahaha! Fucking monsters! Fuck you! Ahahaha!”

“Well shit, we broke ‘im…” Roland murmured, looking only a little put off as he watching Milo’s laughter dissolve completely into wretched crying.

“No,” Dr. Pearce was watching the scene as well, her expression blank as ever but a curious interest in her gaze, “It’s just shock. It will pass. But perhaps moving Ness-114-A back to the containment room would be better for now. We can continue testing when it calms—“

Milo chose that moment to throw up.

He bent double on the exam table, leaning over his own crossed legs, and heaved onto the tile floor. A slurry of spit and stringy bile and phlegm splattered across the polished white, oozing with thin tendrils of purple-black. More of it dripped out of Milo’s open mouth, his heaving gasps and coughing jolting his body as another wave of sickness pushed itself up his throat. 

There was even more of the black ooze in it this time. 

“ _What’s wrong with me!?_ ” Milo’s voice was a broken scream, made wretched and hoarse by his crying and vomiting. He was shivering on the exam table, curled in on himself, as small as he possibly could. Sobs wracked his frame, battling with his coughs and desperate gulps of air. He was a small and frightened thing, something that might have brought pity to anyone else.

But not to Dr. Pearce,

“That,” She said cooly, “Is what we are attempting to find out. Roland, have Ness 114-A taken back to containment for the day. Administer a mild sedative. We’ll run base diagnostics tomorrow and set up plans for future testing. Have a nurse take a sample of the vomit on the floor before it’s cleaned up. And make sure the bio unit gets a scan of it, I want to compare it to the pure sample we got from the nonstandard extraction. Milo Sumney,” He looked up at her with foggy, watery, confused and frightened eyes, his lips chapped and his face pale. There was no sympathy in Pearce’s face, there never would be,

“I suggest you learn to behave yourself. And quickly. If you thought your previous stay here was unpleasant, it will have nothing on what the future now holds for you.”

Then smiled and it was such an empty and cold thing that Milo felt his stomach clench. He doubled over again with a groan that turned into a shivering whimper. It felt like there was a guillotine hovering over his exposed neck, ready to removes his head and send him cascading into a nightmare for more horrible and bloody than this one was. And while Milo wasn’t even sure how his situation could get much worse than it already was, he wasn’t too keen to push any buttons to try and find out. 

But Milo had a rebellious streak that would not be denied.

And his heart refused to give in.

* * *

Milo was stretched out flat on an exam table, wrists above his head with his arms straight. More straps pinned down his wrists and thighs, another under his arms and across his sternum, effectively rendering him as motionless as possible. Even if he was able to move, he wasn’t about to. He was almost holding his breath, barely breathing, his entire body tense with an occasional shiver trailing over his narrow frame.

And intravenous line was slid into the inside of one elbow, an oxygen mask over his face. Every once in a while, he would close his eyes and try to let his thoughts drift away, try to forget, try to let his soul exit his mortal flesh cage and ascend to somewhere without pain or fear. But not seeing what they were doing to him was somehow worse than actually watching it happen. So, inevitably, he would open his eyes again, and whimper at the sight before him.

Another large, silver needle etched in mind-bending runes as lodged like a flagpole in Milo’s stomach. But instead of a syringe attached to the other end, there was a rubber seal that had been peeled back to allow a scientist to feed a narrow, flexible cable down the needle and, presumably, into Milo’s insides. A few, even thinner, wires fed into the puncture around the side of the needle, barely wider than a strand of hair, tickling his sides like spider legs. A few pads had been stuck around the worksite, a few more on his head, neck, and chest, all feeding information to machines that Milo either couldn’t see or didn’t understand. The only one he really understood was the heart monitor, which tended to increase its presence whenever he looked at the needle in his stomach for too long.

“The camera’s reached the subject’s core,” Roland announced from a small bank of monitors off to one side. Milo could just see him if he turned his head a bit to the right, “Non-standard breaching is now at two minutes, fifteen seconds and counting.”

“Any sign of movement?” Dr. Pearce asked from her spot near the scientist who was feeding the cable down the needle shaft. She had been writing on her clipboard almost non-stop since the procedure had begun, barely sparing Milo himself a glance.

“None yet,” Answered a nurse, hunched over the computer Roland was hovering over.

“Two minutes, thirty.” Roland said.

“It’s unfortunate we haven’t had the opportunity to test this equipment more,” The scientist with the cable muttered, brow furrowed as he carefully slid more cable down into the needle, “It’s really amazing, very well crafted.”

“And expensive,” Pearce told her clipboard, “Anything yet?”

“Negati—wait. Hold.” 

The scientist feeding the line froze, as did everyone else in the room. Dr. Pearce actually looked up from her precious clipboard, turning to look at the monitors. Milo wanted to look but he also dreaded what he might see if he did. So he took another shallow breath and stared at the scientist’s gloved fingers holding the delicate length of the camera.

“Picture’s dark,” Said the nurse at the computer, “Let me try raising the— _holy shit_!”

Milo felt a lurch inside him—not in his stomach, not in his organs at all. It felt more like someone had grabbed an essential part of who he was and jerked it sideways a little bit. It was the same sort of feeling you got if you spun around very quickly and then lay on the floor and felt the rest of the world spinning around you, but without the dizziness. It made him bang his head against the table, eyes widening and a strangled whine coming from his throat. 

There was a sudden commotion at the monitor and another awful lurch that had Milo squirming under the tight straps of the table. Through watery eyes that were not quite tears, Milo squinted at the scientist hovering over the big needle. He was now gripping the camera cable tightly in both hands, clearly trying to pull it out. 

And something was pulling back. 

“Shit! What was that!?” Roland was yelling at the computers, “What the _fuck_ is going on with this kid!? What the actual _fuck_!”

Milo let out a cry as that twisted lurch came again, making him press up against the straps, trying to follow the pull in his stomach, arching his back off the table a few centimeters. His eyes rolled, breath stuttering at the sheer _wrongness_ of the feeling, like his very body was rebelling against him, like his soul was attempting leave its fleshy prison through the needle in his abdomen. That wretched purple thing swam to the forefront of his mind and he felt it curling just underneath his skin, could imagine it wrapping sticky tendrils around the bits of machinery in his body and pulling them inside. The thought made him wretch and tears streaked over his temples as he finally choke out a sob,

“Get it out! Gh-get it o-oh-out! Out! Get it out!”

“ _Christ_ , this whole session has gone to shit!” Roland’s voice crackled with frustration and, very faintly, just a hint of fear.

“Get the equipment out,” Pearce barked, her voice steady even as Milo’s begging rose into a fever pitch of screaming, “And get the subject scanned _immediately_. No, we don’t have time to be delicate, just get it _out_. Now. I’ll take it up with the director myself, Sims, just do as you’re told!”

“Pearce—“

“Roland, stop bellyaching and prep a room! Someone get over here and help Sims! Administer a sedative before we go deaf,” Her words were short and clipped and Milo twisted in his restraints enough to see her directing her staff to their positions. 

His gaze inevitably slid to the needle and the wires still puckering from his skin.

Another nurse had come up beside the first and was pulling on the cable as well. They were both obviously straining to retrieve the little camera on the end, heaving backwards on it with all their strength. If he weren’t panicking, Milo might have been fascinated. There was a snapping sensation and both men stumbled backwards, nearly falling over as the thin cable came whipping out of the end of the needle. Milo collapsed bonelessly against the table, sucking in air, the equipment still inside him jittering with his quickening breaths. 

“Dr. Pearce,” Said the first nurse, straightening up with a rather frightened expression on his face, “You should look at this.”

Milo felt something cold sluice through the IV and into his veins as Pearce turned her attention to the nurse. His rapid heartbeat pumped the sedative into his system, flooding him with numbness and heavy weariness. The rest of the world blurred into smears of color and sound, folding over one another in a haze of addled misery.

But the jagged end of the thin cable where the camera was supposed to be was sharp and crystal clear. The wires were jagged and bent, the rubber coating peeled, the entire end frayed and split as if someone had ripped the end off without ceremony. Or chewed through it.

A fine sliver of purple-black ooze drooped from the ruined end of the cable and trailed back down into the depths of the needle. Milo followed it with glassy eyes, his breathing evening out as the sedative took hold, fingertips tingling against the cold surface of the table he wasn’t quite feeling anymore. 

It was with a detached sort of disgust that he watched them ease the needle out of his belly, sliding the wires out shortly after. They put some gauze on the little hole and taped it up with a bandaid, checked his temperature and vitals, and then heaved him into a wheelchair. They did a sloppy job of strapping him in before he was being pushed down the halls to another room. Not that it mattered as the sedative kept him slouched against the loose straps, breath shallow, eyes lidded as he watched the doors spin past him, thoughts marching to the beat of the nurse’s hurried footsteps. Then it was through another door, up off of the chair, and stretched out on a flat bed of sorts. The air smelled faintly of ozone and there was the buzz of sleeping machines.

“Wanna go home…” Milo said dreamily to the ceiling. Something clunked off to the side and there came a groan and an electrical whir of something moving, “Home…”

Afterwards, he couldn’t say for sure whether he’d passed out or if his memory had just gone a bit fuzzy. All Milo remembered was blinking at the glass walls of his quarantined room, his cheeks crusty with dried tear tracks and his mouth dry from spilled words he couldn’t recall.

* * *

Once, there had been an exhibit at the big museum in the city about the human body. When Milo had found out that Jake and Sage had been planning on going _without him_ , he begged and whined and essentially annoyed his way into accompanying them. And then, because Milo was going, Dan might as well go to. And then Milo had told Cody and Cody had begged Dom and what was supposed to be a date for two had ended up being a field trip for seven. 

Upon actually viewing the exhibit, Milo whispered to Cody that this was probably the _least_ romantic place for a date he had ever seen. Cody had teased him for nearly five minutes about what Milo’s idea of romance was before they were bustled along by Miranda to catch up with the rest of the group. 

Milo had a few sickly chills from that exhibit; the organs on display, the mapping of veins in pressed glass cases, the crumpled remains of a smoker’s lungs. It was disgustingly fascinating in a way he didn’t quite understand. He was definitely grossed out but he couldn’t stop looking. Sage said it was like when you go by a car accident—you don’t want to keep looking, almost feel like you shouldn’t look, but the curiosity and that peculiar feeling of distressed safety kept your eye on it. 

“Humans,” Sage said as they stood next to Milo and looked at a case displaying an uncoiled intestinal track, “Like being scared. Well, most of ‘em. That’s why horror movies exist. And haunted houses ’n stuff. There’s a kind of, like, thrill in it but—but, like, you know you’re safe so that makes it fun. So, you know you’re not _really_ going to get hurt but the tension and build up is there, that same fright, so it’s just enjoyable. I think that’s why some people come to see stuff like this, too. It’s weird and kinda gross and no one _really_ wants to think too much about their insides. They’re just in it for the science. And the spoops.”

“Then how come you only watch scary movies with the lights on?” Milo asked snidely and Sage made an exaggerated noise of offense.

“Because, _sir_ ,” They pressed a hand to their chest, looking for all the world like a Victorian heiress who’d had their skirts insulted, “I am a _coward_.”

Then they’d ruffled his hair and he’d swatted at them and Jake had told them to stop playing in front of the human organs, please, this is a public space. Milo remembered goofing about in the gift shop with Cody afterwards, squeezing the stress balls that looked like human hearts so they swelled up in odd places and skirting the lidless, staring eyes of the muscle covered head on display. He remembered glancing up once, from the back of the shop, scanning it for his family on impulse, as if to make sure they were still there.

Dominic was turning an hourglass over in his hands, watching the iridescent sands tumble from one bulb to the other. He said something to Miranda, who smiled at him and he’d beamed back at her with the flustered brightness of a new crush. Dan was talking with Jake and Sage, pointing at something in the little space-themed part of the shop. Jake was shaking his head dismissively but Sage was clearly egging him on, bumping their shoulder against his and smiling against his ear. Jake blushed at something they’d said and Dan laughed. Sage had their hand tightly in Jake’s, fingers intertwined, slotted together perfectly. It was so achingly simple and domestic that Milo subconsciously took a snapshot of it, held the moment in his mind as a warm and precious memory. 

It was those little memories he tried to focus on instead of the chatter of the scientists buzzing around his room. 

Just like Sage had said about staring at a car accident even though you didn’t really want to, Milo couldn’t help but prick his ears to catch what they were saying about him. They were talking about _him_ so of course he was going to listen. It was like hearing gossip about yourself in the high school bathroom—no matter how horrible it was, you couldn’t help but listen. 

He would lay on his side or on his stomach, hiding most of his face in his pillows or huddled under his blankets, peering out at the staff from his little fortress of linens. They bustled about in front of the tables and monitors, taking notes and gesturing and talking to one another. Sometimes, one of them would glance in at him, mark something on a paper, and look away again. Once in a while, he managed to catch one’s eye and they stared each other down until the scientist blinked or tore themselves away. Milo rarely left the shelter of his cot when a lot of the staff was around, feeling too exposed with so many eyes on him from so many different directions. He never hid completely—they didn’t like that—except for once, when they brought his hoodie in and set it up on the other side of the glass right at the head of his cot. The hood with its little teeth had looked like a gaping maw looming over him and Milo had pulled his blankets over his head and not come out for a while afterwards.

Worst by far were his sessions with Dr. Pearce. 

She was no longer interested in his family life or his past, only whatever it was that was living inside him. And she was certainly dissatisfied by his lack of answers.

“Did you ever knowingly consume substances not fit for human consumption?” She asked, tapping her pen against the edge of her clipboard. 

Milo rolled his eyes, “Yeah, couple ‘a times for my channel. Ended up in the hospital ‘cause of it once. Got me in a lot of trouble and it made me sick. Like talking to you does.”

She ignored the jab entirely, continuing to write in her notes, “Yes, we have all those records. Did you notice anything unusual at the time of consumption or in the time afterwards?”

“No.” Milo replied dully, already checking out of the conversation. He slouched in his seat, dragging against the jingling weight of the chains on his straitjacket. His stomach rumbled in discontent and hunger but it had become such a familiar ache that it hardly bothered him.

“Do you want to tell me why you haven’t been eating your meals?”

He shrugged half-heartedly, staring at the floor and letting his mind wander away to better places. He was content to lose himself in the memories of home and family, ignoring the Facility and daydreaming of being back in the warm and loving arms of the people who cared for him. To hell with this place and what it wanted from him.

Dr. Pearce tsk’d in disapproval and set her clipboard down, focusing all of her ice cold attention on Milo. It pinned him to his seat and he glanced up at her warily. She didn’t _look_ annoyed but when she spoke, her voice had a hard edge that told him otherwise,

“I see you’ve regressed to being uncooperative once again. I don’t think I need to remind you that the level of comfort you may or may not experience is entirely up to you.”

“Who cares. You’re gonna torture me anyway.” Milo’s words were sullen and bitter, dejected and hurt in a sort of pouting, childish manner as he scowled at Pearce. He felt his eyes grow hot and he sniffed, breath stuttering as he tried to keep himself from crying again.

Pearce stared at him, “We do not _torture_ ; we study. This is a place of science. And you are a specimen to be studied. Your cooperation is expected but not necessary for our proceedings and we _will_ be taking whatever measures we need to further our understanding of the curse that inhabits your body. You are _dangerous_ , Milo Sumney.”

“I’m _fourteen_ —“

“Do you mean to tell me that you have a complete understanding of your curse, the hoodie, and the entity that resides inside you?” Her question stopped Milo cold and she must have seen him stiffen, his jaw clenching and his stomach turning over in disgust at the mere mention of the _thing_ that lived inside him, “As I thought. You have no idea what this entity is capable of, what it may do to you or others,” That smug look flickered in her eyes again, “So I’m sure you understand why it’s necessary and well within our jurisdiction to take whatever steps we need to ensure the safety of this country.”

Milo wanted to protest, he really did. He wanted to yell that he was fourteen and if whatever was inside him hadn’t done anything yet, why would it ever? He wanted to scream and cry and make demands. He wanted to thrash and bite and kick and claw until everyone was so fed up with him, they gave him back to his family just to be rid of him. He wanted them to hurt the same way he’d been hurting for weeks now.

But he couldn’t shake the fear that clung to the back of his mind with malicious, sticky fingers and whispered that one day, this thing would make him do something unspeakable. 

_One day_ , it hissed, _I will make you hurt your family_.

And it was that horrified thought that kept Milo silent as the nurses came to collect him and escort him back to his cell.


	7. The Machine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Issuing a specific content warning for this chapter because it's very rough. Contains extreme acts of violence against a child, graphic depictions of force feeding, and what could be considered torture via machinery.

Milo grew weaker as the days stretched onwards. 

He hardly ate and drank little water, remaining sprawled tiredly on his cot in his glass walled containment cell. When he wasn’t being dragged around for testing, he was sleeping. And if he was, for some reason, not sleeping and had enough energy to do so, he was throwing temper tantrums. Milo would save what little energy he could muster until there were a decent amount of scientists and nurses in the outer room, then he would bang on the glass walls, kick them, hurl insults, and scream wordlessly until he was dizzy with the effort of it. 

The testing had lightened up, at least. They did nothing more invasive than weekly blood samples, mostly scanning him with a dozen different machines for any sign of whatever was supposedly still inside him. No one had seen any sign of it since the disaster with the little camera on the cable and Milo was more than happy to keep it that way. Roland seemed genuinely frustrated by their lack of process, and if Roland was getting pissed then that was a tally in Milo’s book.

“You realize this little act of rebellion is endangering your life,” Pearce lectured him as a couple of nurses dragged his limp body into a chair and strapped him in. His head was wedged between two thick pads, a strap pulled tight over his forehead to keep him still. He eyed her blearily as she continued, “This not only throws off our entire testing schedule, but it also makes things much more difficult for you. You can look forward to going without pillows or blankets for a few days. And consider this part of your punishment as well.”

Milo scoffed at her but his bravado didn’t last long. A doctor approached, holding a thin, rubbery looking tube that glistened with some kind of lubricant. Behind the doctor, other staff were bustling around with a stand and bag of brown liquid. 

“Hold very still,” Said the doctor, “Or you’ll get seriously hurt.”

Before Milo could begin to ask what they were doing, the doctor slid the tube into Milo’s nose. 

Milo bucked against the restraints, eyes watering as he tried to pull away from the foreign object sliding into his nasal passage, but there was nowhere for him to go. He let out a noise of pain and fear that turned into a hacking cough as the tube moved deeper inside him. He gagged and writhed, nails scratching at the armrests, heels beating uselessly against the footrest. It hurt to breathe and he wanted to be sick but the sensation was so unusual that his body wasn’t sure how to respond. Tears streamed out of his eyes, blurring his vision, and he felt that tube sliding deeper and deeper inside him, slowly, agonizingly, like the worm he’d so long imagined was curling around inside him already. Begging words and stuttering pleas shook their way off his tongue, interspersed with gags and coughs and dry heaves.

Then came the feeling of something splashing into his stomach and it was such an intrusive and revolting sensation that he almost threw up again. 

“This is force feeding,” Dr. Pearce told him through his shallow, wheezing breaths, “It’s extremely frowned upon in the medical profession and is considered a torture method by most. However, it’s still in practice in prisons and we have been cleared to perform it on subjects participating in a hunger strike.” Milo couldn’t see her because his eyes were squeezed shut in pain and the tears kept leaking from them anyway, but he could imagine the unimpressed look she was giving him as she told him off for his bad behavior as if he were a preschooler who wouldn’t share their toys,

“So if you continue this ridiculous behavior of refusing to eat properly, then we will continue to force feed you. Three times a day you will be led into this room, strapped into this chair, and have a tube shoved down your throat. We would rather _not_ perform this act, as it’s extremely dangerous and it’s highly likely to cause serious damage to your nasal cavity or even your lungs, should the doctor accidentally insert the tube into your esophagus.”

Milo risked cracking an eye open, his vision blurry at the edges, smeared by tears. But he could just see Dr. Pearce standing over him, looking down on him with that same detached curiosity she always did. Only this time her looking was colored by something like an impatient disappointment, 

“So I’ll ask you again, Subject One-One-Four, how much do you want to make yourself suffer?”

* * *

His cot was stripped bare when they dumped him back in his cell, sweaty and tear-stained, his muzzle tight around his head once again. 

Milo didn’t care who was watching him then, didn’t care who saw him break down. Because at this point, they had seen every inch of him, taken every inch of him, violated nearly every inch of him. There was nothing left that they hadn’t touched and that revelation scoured him so deeply it was like a physical wound that bled in his chest.

So he curled up on his cot, arms wrapped around his middle, and cried.

He cried for what seemed like hours. Tears and snot smearing on the inside of his muzzle, screams of a soul deep pain bouncing around the walls of his cell, his breathing shuddering and choked, sometimes so rapid it was near dangerous levels of hyperventilation. He was a wretched and broken thing, crying out for someone to come hold him, calling out the names of his family, begging for them, asking why, why, why haven’t you come for me yet why?

At some point, he must have worn himself out and fallen asleep because it was the nurses jostling his muzzle to remove it that roused him. He allowed them to sit him up and take it off before they backed off and set a tray of food on the floor in front of him, leaving him alone in the cell. Milo considered the tray of food with a bleary look of exhaustion and red-rimmed eyes still crusted with salt from his earlier crying. He thought about giving into them, about giving up, about how much easier things would be if he just did what they asked. He thought about the feeding tube and the ugly feeling of it sliding down his throat. He thought about how tired he was and how much his body ached.

He thought about Jake and Dan, probably in jail somewhere, mistreated and hurt because of him.

He thought about Sage, stuck out there alone, hopefully away from the Facility’s reach.

He thought about Cody and Dom, neither of whom had any idea of what had happened.

He thought about how long he had been trapped in here, and how much longer he would have to suffer.

Milo leaned down, picked up his tray of food, and began to eat.

* * *

Things changed.

Where once had been routine, Milo was now never quite sure when the nurses would come for him or what he would be subjected to that day. Sometimes he never got a lunch, the meal skipped entirely in favor of tests or scans or whatever. And there were always more tests.

They had him run on a treadmill, measuring his breathing and his heart rate and all manner of things, keeping him going until his legs gave out and he crashed to the floor. He hadn’t been able to walk properly for several days afterwards and was either plopped in a wheelchair or dragged unceremoniously along the floor to the destination. 

One scan had required his abdomen to be covered in this clear jelly substance that was icy in the chilly lab air. The attending nurse had then pressed some kind of wand against his stomach and Milo figured this was some kind of ultrasound, the same sort of thing that let pregnant women see the babies inside them. The reminder of the thing inside him and his accidental comparison of it to a developing baby was so repulsive that he’d thrown up and effectively ended the session prematurely.

The worst one yet had been when they were “prepping him” for a session they were doing later that day.

Milo allowed them to steer him into one of the small rooms with a tile floor and a drain in the center. Something about it prickled of familiarity and it wasn’t until they were strapping his ankles to a stool with the straitjacket still tight around his shoulders that he realized what it was. 

When he’d first arrived in the Facility, when they had chopped off his hair, it had been exactly like this room. Maybe even _this_ exact room. The memory made him whimper and twist in his bindings, looking around frantically for any sign of what was happening. But a forceful hand on the back of his head pushed him down, pressing his chin into his chest so he almost bit his tongue.

There was a high buzz of clippers.

“No! Wait, what are you doing!?” Milo jolted, nearly toppling the stool, and more hands grabbed him, holding him steady with bruising grips as the sound of clippers drew closer, “No, no, no! Wait, no, please! I was good! I’ve been good, please, I’ve been good! I’ve been good! I’ve been good!”

His begging cries went ignored and the razor sheared through what little hair he had left. It was nowhere as near as gentle or careful as it had been that first day, digging in a little painfully more than a few times, the nurses jerking his head this way and that and bending him around so the clippers could get into all the space they needed. It was yet another humiliating experience and by the end of it, Milo was choking on little sniffling tears and hiccups of emotion, shame making him duck his head and try to hide what little dignity he had left. If he had any at all.

When they dumped him back in his cell, Milo spent several minutes working up the courage to feel his shaved scalp. He raised his trembling hands, letting his fingertips travel along the straps of the muzzle at first before he felt brave enough to let them slip off and touch his head. The feeling of skin and bristles under his fingers brought tears to his eyes and a hitch to his breathing. He knew if he looked up, he might be able to pick out his reflection in the glass walls of his cell, but the dread at seeing the last shred of dignity they’d stolen from him was more than he could take at the moment. 

Instead, Milo clambered onto his cot, grabbed the blanket he’d been given back, and hid under it, squeezing his eyes shut and blocking out the world.

The texture of the blanket felt weird against his naked head and it only served to make him more uncomfortable. He suddenly felt like a stranger in his own skin, like this body wasn’t his anymore. Some nasty little part of him said of course it wasn’t his body, it belonged to the Facility now, it belonged to Dr. Pearce, they could do whatever they wanted and he couldn’t say a word against them. No one could stop them. 

Milo stewed in these thoughts, sickened and haunted, until they came to collect him. He struggled a little, made tiny noises of distress, skidded on his heels across the cold tile as they dragged him out of the cell. But it was out of discontent rather than a genuine escape attempt and no one seemed particularly bothered by it. They didn’t even bother to shove him into a straitjacket, though they did keep a firm grip on his upper arms as they marched down the bright, sterile hallways. 

The nurses carried him into a room he hadn’t seen before, dimly lit and partially sectioned by a thick wall. On one side of the wall was a collection of control panels, knobs, levers, and screens that were currently all reading STANDBY in large block letters. On the other side, the one the nurses led Milo to, was a nightmare of a machine that made Milo’s blood run cold just by the sight. 

It looked like a thinly padded dentist chair, with the Facility’s ever consistent addition of heavy duty straps. But what made it horrifying was the plethora of additions to it. Mechanical arms were arched over the back or folded against the sides, their ends capped in needles or claps and other tools Milo either didn’t recognize, or didn’t want to dwell on. There was a strip of metal down the backrest of the chair, interspaced with little round sockets that looked like they were waiting for something to be plugged into them. A domed headpiece waited like an open mouth at the top of the chair, thick and heavy, the inside peppered with slots and pads, the outside inscribed with dizzying symbols. Wires and tubes and more tiny robot arms were coiled off the top and sides of the dome, making it look like some kind of mutated metal spider. The entire machine was something out of a horror movie, a torture machine that had been replicated by someone’s fucked up serial killer fantasy. 

Blinding white panic surged through Milo’s system and spiked his adrenaline into overdrive. He dug his heels into the floor, kicking and pulling and twisting to try and get away from the nurses that continued to pull him towards the machine. He might have been screaming but between the roaring in his ears and the sound of his own panicked heartbeat, he couldn’t be sure.

The nurses hauled him up, preparing to set him in the chair, but Milo kicked his legs out, bracing his feet on the chair and pushing back against them. They changed tactics, manhandling him so he was turned around and shoved him hard into the chair, falling onto him before he could recover to strap down his wrists and ankles with metal claps that pinched his skin. One of them unlocked his muzzle, while another took some scissors to the pajama scrub shirt, tugging it off none too gently. 

“What are you doing!?” Milo screamed as the nurses backed away and a different set of doctors in white coats and rubber gloves came forward, “What is this!? What are you doing to me!?”

Further protests from him were cut off as the doctors wedged a silicone bar between Milo’s teeth and hooked the straps to the headrest of the chair. He squirmed, bucking against the restraints, the metal sockets scraping against the ridges of his spine. Muffled cries of protest flew with strings of saliva from his gagged mouth, still trying to wriggle his way out as the doctor’s fitted thick padded straps under Milo’s arms and across his chest and waist. It pressed him flush against the strip on the back of the chair and left his heaving stomach exposed for whatever they were planning next. The doctors slid an IV line into his arm, inspected their work, inspected the machine, and then went behind the separating wall again.

Part of the wall was actually a window, through which Milo could see a collection of staff either watching him or hovering over controls with headsets and clipboards. Dr. Pearce was staring at him with a look that pinned him as effectively as the straps did.

“Subject present is Ness 114-A.” Pearce said, presumably for a recording, “Dr. Orchid Pearce reporting. The subject has been secured into the Arceneaux Constructor and we are proceeding as planned. Activate the alignment system.”

Someone must have pressed a button on the other side of the wall because the straps on Milo tightened with an almost crushing force, squeezing him against the back of the chair and leaving him gasping for breath. He felt the metal strip ripple and shift underneath him and it made goosebumps break out across his skin. He whimpered, a string of drool oozing out of the corner of his mouth and splashing coldly across his chest, his wide eyes begging for mercy from the scientists on the other side of the room.

“Alignment at 99.9%, ma’am,” Said a nurse at the controls.

“Very well. Engage spinal connection.”

“Engaging spinal connection.”

Searing, white hot agony drilled into Milo’s back and he clenched his teeth down so hard on the bit that his jaw ached. He wanted to scream but he was breathless with pain, his vision blurred, his entire body immobile except for his fingers which clawed helplessly at the air. The pain was so great he could distinguish nothing else; no sound or feeling, no taste or smell. The rest of the world had ceased to exist, his body—all the skin and nerves and bone—had been wiped away and all that remained of him was an agony that scrambled what little might have remained of his mind. 

There was no Milo, there was only pain.

When he finally did manage to come back to himself, he was trembling, shivering as if he’d been left outside in the cold. He didn’t even feel sick, he just felt like one, big, throbbing bruise of pain. Even breathing hurt.

It took a few more minutes for him to realize that they must have lowered the headpiece while he’d been having his existential agony crises because he could feel it clamped down just above his brow, casting a dark shadow over his eyes. It felt heavy and cumbersome; Milo could feel the pads inside it pressing against his bare scalp and he was distinctly aware of the areas that did _not_ have padding. It made him nervous. 

“—tive and transmitting,” The voices from the other side of the wall swam in his ears like slurry, almost incomprehensible in his current state, “Should we engage the non-standard probes. ma’am? Or should we let him get his bearings a moment?”

There wasn’t even a pause for thought before Pearce responded, “Engage the probes. Better to get this all over with in one fell swoop so we’re not here longer than we need to be.”

Milo whined, high pitched and quivering and utterly afraid, as two mechanical arms coiled around from behind the chair with a hydraulic hiss. They were wrapped in wires and carried a thick tube near their ends. Coupled with the needle that was almost as big as his thumb, it made them look like nightmare versions of syringes. Milo tried to shake his head, tried to say no, tried to tell them not to do it, but he may as well have been a statue for all the movement he could make and his whines and whimpers went on ignored. 

He watched in terror as the arms rotated towards his abdomen. The needles withdrew into the end, leaving only circular metal openings that pressed against either side of Milo’s stomach, cold and unfeeling as the people watching this happen to him. There was a click and Milo flinched as what felt like little teeth clamped into his skin under the ends of the arms, locking them into place over his admittedly narrower stomach. It hurt but it was nothing as bad as the throbbing pain that still radiated from his back.

Until the needles rocketed forward and were plunged into his body with incredible force. 

Milo retched, twitching painfully in his restraints, screaming against the silicone gag as his eyes rolled back. His chest heaved for breath and his head spun.

No way this was real, no way this was actually happening to him, no way that someone would treat another person—let alone a _child_ —like this.

His screams turned into breathless, hysterical giggling, reality fracturing away from him as his mind vehemently denied the trauma it was experiencing. Real people didn’t do this, real people didn’t act like this, real people didn’t _do this to each other_. 

“I want my daddy!” The words were garbled and warped by the gag in his mouth, choked with emotion and heaving breaths, but Milo screamed them anyway, begging, pleading, trying to make them understand how much they were destroying him, “I want my dad! I want my daddy! I WANT MY DADDY! I WANT MY DADDY! I WANT MY DADDY!”

There was too much happening, too many painful sensations at once, too much suffering piling itself on top of other suffering. It was finally too much and the whole teetering stack of it finally collapsed, burying Milo in things he couldn’t comprehend, only registered as pain. To protect itself from the trauma and the fear and loneliness and the hair thin, needle sharp probe that had just slid into it, Milo’s brain made a decision and clicked off the part of his consciousness that would remember this event.

If it couldn’t knock itself out, then it would make itself forget. 

And as Milo, still screaming and begging and flushed with tears, watched the tube in his stomach start pumping red that slowly faded into purple ooze out of him, he thought he surely must have died and gone to Hell.

Because there could be nothing worse than this.


	8. The Recovery

Existing hurt.

It was a new kind of hurt that Milo had never experienced before and shattered a perspective of the world he hadn’t realized he’d had. 

He knew there were bad people in the world, people who hurt others without thought or care, people who would harm even children just because they were stronger and because they could. But Milo had never seen those people outside of movies and it seemed like those were things that happened to other folk, far away and very different from him. Adults were around to protect kids, adults were stronger so they could defend the weaker, adults were meant to represent safety and security. 

Milo wasn’t stupid.

He was fully aware that Dr. Pearce and her staff didn’t see him as human. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d held onto the notion that because he was a skinny, fourteen year old child that was scared and alone and crying, maybe they would go easy on him. Maybe he was tugging on their petrified heart strings, just a little bit, just enough so they even though they hurt him, they would never do anything that would destroy or kill him. 

He’d been wrong.

Waking up on his cot screaming had brought a swarm of nurses into his cell, holding him down to check his vitals and the IV in his arm and the state of the bandages wrapped all the way up his front and back, twined around his shoulders, and padding his head. When he didn’t stop screaming, they put something in his IV that made him drowsy and heavy but didn’t knock him out. It made him sluggish and slurred his words, but did nothing to assuage his fears.

They’d done something to him. That machine had done something to him and it hurt.

“Can you tell me how you’re feeling?” 

Dr. Pearce was standing outside of his cell, staring at him through the glass wall. It was smudged with his finger prints but he could see her well enough. Milo himself was laying on his cot, sprawled out like a discarded toy and feeling like a half melted stick of butter.

“Wha’d you do t’ me…” He murmured through a mouth that was sloppy and uncoordinated.

“How do you feel?” Pearce persisted in her questioning and Milo let out a heavy sigh.

“Like shit. Tired. Hurt. Wanna go home…” His eyes felt hot.

“The machine you were in is called an Arceneaux Constructer,” Pearce replied, mostly to her clipboard as she took down Milo’s tired responses, “It was built for very deep non-standard examinations that cannot be handled by humans; the kind of precision work that the human eye—and hand—are incapable of performing. It’s also quite effective at extracting large amounts of supernatural substances, able to cleanly filter them from the body’s natural fluids so no harm comes to the subject. It’s a very powerful and very expensive machine,” She blinked at the gaping look of horror on Milo’s face, “Of course, the process of the machine can be extremely taxing on the subject. So we use it as a sort of Plan C.”

“You’re a monster…” Milo growled, the embers of his hatred flickering through his numbed and throbbing body.

“No, 114-A, you are the monster,” The words were said with such a cold conviction that it felt like someone had shot Milo in the chest. Pearce flipped a few pages on her clipboard and continued, jotting down more notes, “However, you do seem to possess the basic human anatomy and as such, we’ll be waiting before our next procedure in order to allow you time to recover. In the meanwhile, you will be confined here and only be escorted out for showers and bathroom breaks. Approved stimuli will be provided for testing purposes only.” Her gaze flickered to Milo once again, tracking his shape and eyeing the bandages wrapped around his body, “Should you experience any pain beyond your capacity to handle, please notify a nurse and they will administer a solution to numb it. Do you have any questions?”

“Why are you…doing…this to me?” 

It wasn’t what he’d wanted to ask but it was what ended up spilling out of him on a ragged, breathless gasp of pain.

Pearce tilted her head, “For science,” She said simply, “And for the further protection of the human race. If the supernatural and magical were to gain a foothold in the world, they would utterly annihilate humanity. Right now, our power lies in sheer numbers. Better to nip any potential dangers in the bud.”

Milo’s vision blurred at the edges as angry tears welled in his eyes, his fingers curling into cramped and shaking fists he had no energy to strike out with, “You…I’m not…doing anything. I’m not…planning anything! I’m just a—a kid! I’m just…a kid! And I want to go…go home! I wanna go home! I wanna go home!”

“You don’t have a home,” Pearce told him sternly, “You belong in a cell, here, in the Facility. You are a hazard. However,” She pursed her lips, sliding her clipboard under her arm and tucker her pen away, “Measures are still being taken to investigate how powerful a hold the curse from Ness 114-B has on you. It may yet be reversible.” Something hopeful must have glittered in the vacant depths of Milo’s eyes because Dr. Pearce quickly added, “I am rather of the opinion that you are no longer human—if you ever were to begin with. In which case. you will be staying here in the Facility indefinitely. We’re done here. You are on bedrest until further notice.”

Milo glared at her until she strolled out of view. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and took a painstaking amount of effort to roll over and hide his face in his pillow. 

These bastards didn’t deserve to see him cry anymore.

* * *

Milo was curled against Dan’s chest, head tucked under his dad’s chin, listening to the steady heartbeat murmuring in his ear. Dan’s arms were warm and firm around him, gentle and cradling. Milo could hear him humming and it made him smile, a lazy and sleepy thing that lingered at the corners of his mouth.

“It’s been too quiet in here for more than an hour, what are you two up to?” Jake, somewhere behind them, entering the room with a second set of footsteps on the heels of his own.

“Shhh,” Dan’s voice was a distant rumble of thunder in his chest, “Little shark’s sleeping…”

“He looks so innocent,” Ozone and sandalwood and a kiss to his temple followed Sage’s voice, “You’d never know he was a little terror.”

“Be nice,” Dan chided in a low voice, fingers smoothing Milo’s hair from his face. Milo sighed dreamily at the touch, oozing deeper into the comfort of Dan’s arms, nuzzling into the warmth of his dad’s embrace, “He’s a good kid.”

Jake made a noise of consent, closer, something shifting and Milo felt another weight nearby, leaning against Dan. He could almost picture it; Dan on the couch with Milo curled up in his arms, Jake leaning against Dan’s side with that tired but happy smile on his face, and Sage probably snuggling up beside Jake with their head on his shoulder and their arms around him. Perfect and calm and safe, all of them bathed in dust motes and golden afternoon sunlight, a painting of serenity and love. It was a picture of home that made an ache of longing throb deep inside Milo’s chest.

An ache that spread from his heart to his back, making his spine twinge in pain. It crept up his neck and sank claws into his skull, rattling a headache behind his eyes that pulsed with each breath he took. Then it sank down into his stomach and twisted it, squeezing the organ in a crushing fist that made Milo gasp and shake and cry out.

His eyes flew open, vision watery with tears, and instead of seeing Dan’s familiar face, he was greeted with the sterile white ceiling of his holding cell. It was cast in grey with the evening hours, the lights in his cell off and only a few remaining on in the room beyond the glass. 

It felt like crashing to the ground after a hundred story drop, the impact crushing in his chest and driving the air from his lungs. Milo whined, letting the tears pool and then spill down the sides of his face as he lay on the cot and stared at the ceiling. He’d wanted that moment so bad, wanted to be in the arms of his family so much that to awake and find that it wasn’t so was enough to kill him inside. He could still feel the warmth of Dan’s arms around him in the blankets wrapped around his skinny frame, could swear he still sense Jake’s fizzling, edge-of-panic energy buzzing at the nape of his neck, could catch the lingering scent of ozone and timber that followed Sage like a shadow. The pain of their absence drove thick iron nails into his heart and out through his back, filling his innards with agony and twisting his heart into a mangled, festering hive of loss and want.

Or maybe that was just the pain medication wearing off.

Milo let the loud, pained whine ease out between his clenched teeth. When that garnered no reaction from the few staff that remained after hours, he sucked in a breath that made the expanding of his ribs feel like snapping toothpicks, and let out a garbled shriek that choked itself off from the pain. Then he curled into a miserable ball and shook with the waves of hurt that rolled through him with each beat of his broken heart.

“Goddamn it, you were supposed to refill his medication!” Hissed one of the nurses from outside, and Milo heard footsteps hurrying across the tile, “Now the damn kid’s awake! Roland’s gonna kill you…”

“Sorry, I just got moved to this project!” Another retorted, their words almost lost under the beeping from the keypad at the cell door, “I’m still getting used to this. I used to be in Artifact Storage; we never did hands on stuff like this…!”

A few quick steps across the floor and Milo peered through his folded arms to see the nurses hovering around his IV stand. The drip fed into a needle in the back of his hand, one that was only still there because of the pain medication it fed him. One of the nurses was tearing the packaging off of a fresh needle, looking frustrated and overworked. The other was hovering at his companion’s shoulder, clutching a glass container of liquid medicine and looking upset. The nurse’s gaze flickered down and caught Milo’s eye; the two stared at one another for a long moment before the nurse furrowed her brow and looked away.

“Wanna go home,” Milo grunted, more out of habit than anything else. The first nurse ignored him, pulling up the plunger in the medicine bottle and watching it fill. The second nurses glanced down again, swallowing hard as Milo uncurled somewhat, giving the man a clear view of the bandages still tight around his skinny chest, “Hey…hey, I wanna go home. Lemme go home.”

Nurse One clenched his jaw, flicking air bubbles from the syringe before he slid it into the IV tube. Nurse Two, on the other hand, was still looking at Milo, chewing on his lower lip and eying the kid with a mixture of curiosity and fear and maybe not a hint of something softer. Milo hoped it was compassion.

“Is he really…I mean, I’ve read the reports and seen the—the stuff,” Nurse Two murmured, still looking at Milo, “But, geez, he’s just—I mean, he just looks like a kid. Is he really as dangerous as—“

“It’s just pretending to be a kid,” Said Nurse One shortly, tossing the used needle in a small biohazard baggie and sealing it, “‘Least that’s what Roland thinks. It’s just a parasite kind of monster that took of a child’s body and it’s just pretending to be a kid. Dr. Pearce thinks it’s just some kind of infection and we can, I dunno, “cure him” or something.” 

“What do you think?” Nurse Two asked as he followed the first nurse out of the cell and back into the lab proper again.

“I dunno, I think he’s just a kid who got his hands on a really powerful thing somehow and it’s fucked him up a bunch,” The man shrugged as he passed Milo’s line of sight, voice crackling through the overhead speakers, “Like, he hasn’t exhibited anything paranormal outside of the reject black licorice stuff that comes out of him right? I think the biggest question is: where does that stuff keep coming from?” Milo rolled over, already feeling the medication kicking in and his eyelids growing heavy as he watched the nurses talk; one of them had taken a seat at a monitor and the other was fiddling with a coffee machine. They were still chatting to one another—mentioning Pearce, experiments, levels—but their voices grew hazy and smeared together, fading into a white noise hum that lulled Milo to sleep before he could struggle against it.

When he blearily cracked his eyes open again, the lights were on full force and more staff were bustling around outside his cell. 

He simply lay there for a long time, letting his mind swim in a primordial soup of despair, loneliness, and homesickness. He might have dozed off again, only to be startled into wakefulness by the cell door opening and a small group striding into the room. His skin prickled at the sight of them and he curled up under his blankets, peering at them from under the covers.

Pearce led the group, a sour-faced Roland flanking her. Beyond them were a gaggle of burly nurses, one of them pushing a wheelchair that jingled with straps. Milo whimpered at the sight, shivering at the thought of being put back under the machine that had rendered him so weak and helpless. But that old anger also flared under his skin, bubbling like tepid water ready to tip over into boiling.

“114-A, since you have exhibited exceptionally good behavior lately—“ God, of course he had, his body had been practically raped be machines and he was a wreck of pain and exhaustion, “—and since you are still recovering and therefore cannot consume solid foods currently, she suggested we allow you an extra special treat.”

At Pearce’s shoulder, Roland made a dismissive noise, glowering at Milo and making it perfectly clear how he felt about the subject. His passive aggressive protesting went on ignored. The nurses brushed past him and plucked Milo off the bed, plopping him into the wheelchair and strapping him in with a practiced quickness. One of them grabbed his IV stand, another positioned himself at the handles of the chair, and they pushed Milo out of the cell for the first time in what felt like years.

Dr. Pearce and Roland overtook the nurses and proceeded to lead the group through the winding halls of the Facility. Milo watched with a dulled curiosity and festering pit of loathing. His tired glare tracked passing staff and doors, tried to take in signage or get some idea of where he was located and how far the exit was. They never went in any elevators or climbed any stairs in the Facility; the whole thing seemed to be a single level, sprawling complex tangle of rooms and halls, an ever expanding web of torture and misery that called itself science. Milo remembered the story from school about the Minotaur and the Labyrinth and wished he had a magical ball of yarn that would lead him out of this awful, horrible maze.

There was another series of turns and then a guard waved them through a pair of double doors. The room beyond was a bit cramped with all of them crammed into it and Milo squirmed in discomfort when the air pressure changed with a hiss and chemical-like smell. Some kind of decontamination chamber? 

Then the double doors across from them were buzzed open and Milo gasped.

Fresh air, cool and crisp and new, filled his lungs.

Sunlight dappled across his skin. 

Birds chittered and called back and forth. 

The scent of earth, of plant life, of flowers and outdoors and life made his heart race.

He was outside.


	9. The Bitter End

It was some kind of courtyard, a large and square-ish space surrounded by four walls of the Facility. A smooth river of concrete wove a path through the grass, its sides closely bordered by tall, iron fencing. Beyond the fence was an abundance of plant life; trees and bushes and flowers, all spilling over one another in a glorious cascade of nature.

It was one of the most beautiful things Milo had ever seen in his life.

The leaves on the trees were mostly bright golds and oranges, tinged with splashes of red, though a few clung stubbornly to their brilliant green. The grass was drying out a bit, fading to yellow in patches, but it was lush and neatly trimmed. Hardy flowers clung in bunches to the sunlight streaming down from above, their petals vibrant blues and purples, tiny blossoms reaching towards the heavens. Bushes of ripe red berries twisted their leaves through the bars of the fencing, ivy snaked its way up the side of the building, and the air was heavy with the scent of dirt and greenery. Birds chirped loudly in the background, hidden by the foliage or flitting back and forth quickly over the path, darting up into the open sky. Riding the winds to freedom, to places far away. 

Milo’s toes curled on the footrests of the wheelchair, itching to leap up and run, to race through the grass like he’d used to. His body twitched, arms tugging at the restraints on his wrists and making them rattle. He sucked in a deep breath, despite the ache of his ribs and the pressure of the bandages, drew in the scent of life beyond the sterile walls, let it fill his lungs until he was fit to burst. The smell of the outside and the fresh air made fireworks burst in his chest and he held his breath as long as he could until the ache grew too much and he let it out slowly. 

For the first time in a very long time, something almost peaceful settled over him.

It was promptly shattered by the reminder that he was not alone.

Roland had stopped farther down the path ahead and tugged a cigarette from a box in his pocket. He ignored the disapproving stare Pearce was giving him and proceeded to light it, puffing away until he was moodily sending a stream of smoke into the sky. The nurses stopped pushing the wheelchair and stepped back, giving them space but not too much space. Milo eyed the doctors around him warily, tired but no less alert. This little field trip outside was heaven sent, sure, but hell could quickly be nipping at its heels.

The silence stretched on.

Wind through the leaves and birdsong broke up the quiet tension every now and then. But it was such an uncomfortable and cold feeling that burned the edges of the pleasant day, the Milo eventually snapped under the strain of it.

“Why did you bring me out here?”

Roland straightened up from his position leaning against the fence and dropped his mostly spent cigarette to the ground, grinding it out underneath his shoe. Dr. Pearce, who had been staring idly at some of the flowers nearby, turned to face Milo again, readjusting her glasses as she did so,

“You’ve been very well behaved. And it has been too long since you were last outside and around real plant life. It’s good for the mind and the soul to be among nature.”

Milo frowned, “You’re not…is this…a trick?”

Pearce blinked, “A trick? I’m afraid I don’t understand. This is not a…ruse to get you to drop your guard or anything of the sort. It is medically proven that human beings tend to function better when around plant life. We have put off this exposure for too long.”

“Might help you heal better too,” Roland muttered. Milo shot a glance at him but Roland was frowning at the trees on the other side fo the fence, “You’re so…friggin’ scrawny. Pathetic.”

Milo bristled but didn’t retaliate. He didn’t have the energy to spare. If Pearce was telling the truth—and he sincerely doubted that she was—then nothing more would come of this outing than some sunlight and fresh air. Even if they did take him aside to experiment on him later, Milo could still enjoy this moment while he had it. So, with one final, distrustful glance at the staff around him, Milo relaxed into his seat, took as deep a breath as he could without expanding the ache in his abdomen, and let the serenity of the outdoors wash over him.

At some point, he’d closed his eyes, imaging that he was somewhere else, somewhere open and free, surrounded by people who loved him. 

When he opened his eyes again, he was back in cell, tucked under his blankets, with his muzzle back on his face and the IV removed from his hand. Milo stared at the ugly bruise mottled across the back of his hand, creeping over his knuckles like a spreading stain. The ache it carried was uncomfortable, but no where near as painful as the one that stabbed at his heart.

* * *

Milo might have been suspicious if he hadn’t been recovering and was therefore spending most of his time sleeping. 

They’d started bringing him meals again, soft breads and bland soups at first, eventually working back up to his regular, equally bland meals. The testing they did was really more like check-ups; inspecting his vitals and his healing injuries. The first time Milo had watched them take the bandages off, he’d wretched at the sight of the circular scars around the puncture wounds in his stomach. When Roland had seen the look on Milo’s face, he’d laughed,

“Your back looks even worse.”

Milo didn’t want to imagine it.

With the bandages finally removed, Milo was forced to face the extent of the damage they had done to him. Apart from the smooth scars on his abdomen, there were also tiny ones on his shaved head—he could feel them under his fingertips when he ran his hands over the bristly hair that was just starting to grow in again. He tried to feel his back, more afraid to not know than anything, and had managed to feel jagged, bubbled scar tissue before he’d wrenched his hand away. He’d had to hide under his blankets for a while after that, trying to remember how to breathe as horrified panic chewed through his mind and sent his heart racing. 

What the hell had these people done to him.

He wondered if anyone would be able to look at him now. He wondered if his family would be able to still love him when he’d been mutilated and covered in scars, if they would still hold him and hug him the same way they had before. If he would still be Milo after everything was said and done.

Once in a while, sickness would stir inside him him and he’d feel too sick to even smell his food. When that happened, they dragged the old hoodie out and forced him to be near it, even when he tried to hide from it. He’d pace to the far end of his cell and hunker down in the corner until they realized he’d distanced himself from it. Then they’d move it again and the whole process would start over again. Once they’d put him in a straitjacket and shoved the hoodie on over top of him. It had made his skin crawl and sent him kicking and wriggling with fear. That thing wasn’t his hoodie anymore. It was a monster and it had ruined his life. 

If he never saw it again, it would be too soon.

So caught up between his mangled body and the dark thoughts and exhaustion was he, that he didn’t have much energy left to put towards what the staff. Sometimes he watched them bustling around outside his cell. But for the most part he was content to ignore them and lose himself in daydreams and the blissfulness of sleep. After all, ignorance was bliss. 

Milo didn’t know how many days it had been when the nurses swarmed him and dragged him out of bed before he’d even woken up. His blankets were ripped away and he was plucked off his cot before the cooler air of the cell had sunk into his skin. By the time he’d managed to blink the sleep from his eyes and register that not all of the lights were on, they had already passed most of the rooms and halls that Milo recognized. They had him under the arms, lifted high enough off the floor that his feet dangled in the air, their expressions set and stern.

“H-hey,” Milo’s voice croaked with the last vestiges of sleep, “Hey, what’re—what’s going on? What’s happening? Did I do something wrong?” No one looked at him and no one answered. Milo frowned, wriggling a bit, wincing when it only made them tighten their grips. They could have been taking him back to that awful machine, but this didn’t seem like it was in the same direction. The halls here were wider, with more space between sets of double doors. Wordless, color-coded signs on plastic rings hung by the doors, designating things Milo didn’t know. A chemical smell clashed with the faint scent of drywall and construction, plastic sheeting sometimes hung across walls or over empty door frames, orange-white horses warning of building maintenance. A nurse crossed their path with an empty gurney and Milo felt a prickling of danger shiver down the back of his neck as she vanished down a different hallway and their journey continued. 

One of the nurses pushed open a set of the double doors and Milo was carried into a large room that was dimly lit. Except for a few monitors and the brilliant circle of lights near its center.

Huge overhead lights that were doing a fantastic job of lighting up the polished metal operating table.

Milo took in the tray of medical tools, the team of doctors in surgical gloves and masks, and the heavy straps on the table and ice flooded his veins. His muscles seized in panic, his entire body going ridged in shocked horror as the sight drew closer and closer. It wasn’t until the nurses lay him on the table that he finally jolted back to life with an ear splitting scream.

They had loosened their grips in preparation to strap him down and so weren’t ready for when he bolted, slithering out of their startled grasps and running for the doors. Everything felt like too much and not enough in those brief moments of freedom; the hard floor underneath his bare feet with bitter cold, the heavy shocks of his own footfalls sent sparks of pain up his spine, he could feel his own breaths scraping his throat like sandpaper. The room stretched, narrowing into a single focus, a single point in all of existence—the double doors. The exit. The way out. The escape.

Someone tackled him, arms wrapping around his waist and dragging him to the floor with bang. Milo wheezed as the air was nearly forced out of his lungs, twisting around in his assailant’s grip until he was on his back. He caught a glimpse of wide eyes and a medical mask before he was kicking out ferociously with his bare feet. The heel of his foot smashed into his attacker’s face and something crunched. Milo was released with a yelp and he scrambled away, clawing across the sleek floor until he’d managed to get back to his feet and was running for the door again. His back was radiating pain, pulsing with each beat of his heart and each thud of his foot on the tile floor but he didn’t dare stop. He could hear the heavy footsteps of his pursuers behind him and he pushed himself to go faster, reaching out a handing desperation.

His palm stung as it slammed into the door bar, sending him tripping over his feet into the hallway and bouncing into the opposite wall. The overhead fluorescents dazzled him for a moment as he floundered to orient himself, panic shooting spikes of fear and adrenaline into his trembling frame. So loud was the beating of his own heart in his ears that it almost drowned out the shouts of the pursuing staff. 

Milo had no idea where he was going, no idea which way the exit was. He only knew that he had to get away. He was driven by the pure, animalistic instinct to get out.

A flash of orange ahead and Milo launched himself under the road block horse, sliding underneath the sign on it and tumbling through plastic sheeting on the other side. The smell of mortar dust and drywall and the metal-ozone tingle of power tools hit the back of his nose as he slammed into a large box of tools in his path. He bounced over them, floundering, trying to get back to his feet even as the screaming agony in his back made stars burst in front of his eyes.

“Shit, is that a kid?”

“The fuck—“

“Hey, kid, you okay?”

Men in overalls and hardhats loomed over him, their shirts stained and their expressions confused and concerned. Milo whimpered, backpedaling frantically until he bumped into a wall. They were adults, they were strangers, and they were in the Facility—they were not to be trusted. The workers took several steps back, glancing at one another, before they were distracted by the shouts ringing down the hall from Milo’s pursuers.

Milo took the distraction for the gift it was and launched himself onto a nearby ladder that was set up next to an unblocked air vent, its metal cover missing. He banged his shins on the steel steps as he clambered up it, fingers scraping the roughed metal. He had to jump to reach the air vent, not quite tall enough to reach it even from the top step of the ladder. He leap of faith caused the ladder to tip and fall over with a resounding crash. Milo’s fingers dug into the smooth metal inside of the vent, his bare feet kicking against the wall, his entire body wriggling furiously as he tried to push himself in, just a little bit more, just one good push and he could get away, he could—

Hands closed around his ankles and yanked him savagely from the vent. His fingers squealed across the unblemished metal, matching the shrieking of terror that came out of his lungs.

They caught him as he came tumbling out of the wall, vice-like grips settling on his arms and legs, holding him in the air between a bustling group of nurses. They carried him far too easily back through the plastic sheeting and into the hall proper. That didn’t mean he made it easy for them. Milo bucked and screamed and wrenched himself this way and that, throwing himself every which way in their grips, trying to get loose. He snapped his teeth at their fingers and one of them flicked him hard in the temple, making his head spin. There was a lot of shouting and angry voices, all of them smearing into an incomprehensible cacophony of terrifying noise.

Everything snapped sharply into focus when he felt the cold metal of the table against his spine.

Milo screamed and the scream turned into a dry, heaving cough as he choked on his own air and saliva. His chest heaved with gasping sobs and coughs as they strapped him down, pulling the straps painfully tight against his body, his arms splayed out to his sides.

The coughing got worse as his panic escalated, tears blurring the bright lights into white starbursts. Bile and something sour and metallic clogged his throat, bubbling into his mouth and spilling from his lips. It was suffocating, sticky and tar thick, clinging like glue to the inside of his mouth. Milo thrashed, trying to breathe through the gummy substance. A savage cough wracked his frame and a spray of black and red splattered down his front. The shouts of the staff sounded far away as his vision swam, the pinch of the needle in his arm a distant prod against his dulling senses. The taste of blood and rot sat heavy in his mouth, the stink of iron burning the back of his nose. His eyelids fluttered, ice prickling through his veins, his mind going fuzzy as the world melted away and drew him into a quiet pool of chemical sleep.

And then it was dark and it was silent and Milo was gone.

* * *

Miles turned into dreams turned into whispers turned into nightmares turned into seconds.

Reality looked out the window of the bus, decided it didn’t like the destination, and remained seated. The travelcard of destiny slipped from its pocket and was lost behind the couch. Reason was left at a gas station two stops past.

It was too cold and there was never enough warmth.

Something sang but the song didn’t use words. Logic was drunk at the bar and anything that might have been remotely stable turned into sand and melted through an hourglass.

There was nothing there.

Just the dark.

And the quiet. 

And the forgotten.

* * *

was that the light at the end of the tunnel…?

* * *

—in this house we don’t talk about Milo Senior in this house we don’t talk about Milo Senior in this house we don’t talk about Milo Senior in this house we don’t talk about Milo Senior in this house we don’t talk about Milo Senior we don't talk—

* * *

The Parker House is empty. 

All the devils and ghosts are here.

* * *

i want to go home

* * *

the dull ache of a body in pain

(his body…?)

muffled pin of sound, far away, constant, steady  
  


(beep…beep…beep…beep…)

(does it mean something?)

something that might have been voices

(hurts….)

floating, weightless, untouchable

(where…?)  
(lost, afraid, alone)  
(is anyone there…?)

(home…)

darkness

* * *

Milo woke up because he hurt.

His eyelids fluttered open a crack, but he closed them again when bright light seared across his vision, making them sting for a moment. It drew a soft, pained noise from the back of his sore throat. His body felt like a bruise covered in bruises, sore and aching with each steady thud of his heart. His joints felt stiff, his muscles felt stretched like old rubber bands, his skin prickling with extra sensitivity. Even his bones hurt, twinging in little spikes of pain through his body.

But his chest burned.

Someone was holding a hot poker to his skin and digging it into his flesh, carving into his body and making it hard to breathe. Milo whimpered, a weak and pathetic sound that was barely a breath of air. He tried to move but it stirred the burning feeling into a fire that scorched his veins and sent nausea swimming through his system. His stomach twisted, which only caused him more pain, and he mewled helplessly, tears springing into his closed eyes as the sound scratched tiny needles into his throat. Even the tears running hot down his cheeks were like thin streaks of acid on his skin. He felt hollowed out and full of fire all at once and the pain was an overwhelming riptide that bore him out into a sea of misery.

Over the pounding in his head and the roaring in his ears, Milo hear footsteps and a disapproving cluck. Something clinked and jostled above him. He sensed another presence nearby.

Steeling himself, Milo cracked his eyes open, squinting through bright light and heavy lashes at the hazy figure beside him. Blinking a couple of times made his vision settle enough for him to recognize a nurse as she fussed with a medicine bag on an IV stand. It took his sluggish brain a few minutes to put two and two together, but when he did, it drew another strangled, quiet whine out of him. The nurse glanced at him, met his pleading gaze, and looked away, still busy switching out the medical drips that fed into the needle lodged into the back of Milo’s hand.

He tried to say something, tried to beg, but all that came out was a hoarse, cracked and strangled whisper of a sound that scraped sandpaper down his throat. He tried again, desperation making the stinging tears flow faster, the pain throbbing through his body. He tried to ask for help, tried to ask for comfort, tried to ask for his home, his family, for anything other than this. 

The nurse only cast him one last glance and then turned away. She walked back out the door, ignoring the broken cries that followed after her. 

* * *

Milo drifted in and out of sleep, rolling through lost hours on waves of pain and numbness. 

He was recovering from…something.

Something bad.

He couldn’t think of what it was. Couldn’t remember anything between the dugs pumping through him and the white-out terror that flooded his mind whenever he tried to think back on it. And touching that prickling fear made his heart race, which made the pain flair in his chest, which made him cry and that only made things hurt even more. The pain was a constant companion, even with the numbing drugs and the countless days of sleep. It would rouse him whenever the medication ebbed too low or if he twisted or moved too much, peeling back any notion of comfort he might have been trying to build.

The staff tended to him, were careful to keep him stable and alive. But they didn’t speak to him. They didn’t comfort him. They wouldn’t pat his hand or offer him a gentle smile or tell him everything would be okay, that he was strong, that he was a fighter. 

The ache inside him was more than just physical.

He didn’t know how long he was in that bed, recovering. He could barely focus on the time spent there at all, only left with a vague sense of weightlessness, dulled pain, and harried voices. Sometimes he thought he heard Dan or Cody. Once he knew for sure he had begged for death. But most of that time was lost in hazy darkness and smeared figments of nightmares clinging to the edges of his mind.

Milo was terribly sore when he was finally able to rise out of his drugged stupor enough to be more aware of his surroundings. It was a manageable soreness, the kind that came from the tail end of still healing injuries but pinched enough to let you know it was still a problem. His breathing was shallow and moving too much sent twinges of pain through him, but he was awake and he was alive. That had to count for something.

The hospital bed, propped into a semi-sitting position, had raised bars on either side, the kind that kept patients from rolling out of bed, heavy and plastic. Wires and tubes curled from under his hospital gown, from his arm and hand, from his nose, dripping off the sides of the bed and hooking into various machines. The room itself was small, a hydraulic pressured door against one wall, a few storage cabinets on another, and a tiny bathroom tucked against another, consisting of only a sink with a mirror and a toilet—there was no door on the narrow, closet-like space. The space was as clinical and cold as the rest of the Facility, with only a narrow, rectangular window near the ceiling letting in a sliver of orange sunlight. Milo spent a very long time simply watching the dustmotes dancing in the sun beam, his eyes lidded and tired, hypnotized by the simplicity of it all. 

The hiss of the door opening startled him, making his heart monitor race for a moment. He locked eyes with the nurse who had entered and they stared at one another for a moment before the man shook himself and entered the room fully. Milo tracked him carefully, fingers twitching on his bed spread as the nurse set down the heavy bucket he’d been carrying and stepped up to the side of the bed.

“Ness 114-A, are you coherent?”

Milo blinked, tried to swallow past his dry throat, and nodded slowly. 

The nurse grunted and tugged out his cellphone, typing away for a moment before he returned it to his pocket. He washed his hands in the bathroom sink, pulled some gloves on from the cabinets, and returned to the end of Milo’s bed. He met Milo’s gaze readily enough as he spoke,

“I’m going to do a basic assessment and then remove some of the equipment attached to you. As long as you comply and don’t struggle, you shouldn’t be hurt. If at any time, I feel threatened, you will be punished. Do you understand?” Milo nodded again, already frightened into submission simply by the notion that this stranger was going to be touching him, “If you feel like you’re in pain at all, though, please don’t hesitate to tell me. Your recovery seems to be going well but these kinds of surgeries can be risky.”

Milo wasn’t sure he wanted to know what “these kinds of surgeries” meant. So he stayed as still as possible as the nurse went about his business.

It was a humiliating experience, to be poked and prodded and then manipulated in such a manner. Milo actually closed his eyes and swallowed back the tears that wanted to come during parts of it. Discomfort warred with pain and eventually settled into a tender embarrassment; a delicate flavoring to the simmering pool of disgust and loathing still bubbling steadily inside him. It made his throat feel full of hot lumps of smoldering coal and something in his chest fester like boiling acid. But it also made his stomach hurt.

“Everything seems to be in order,” The nurse said eventually, gathering the discarded tubes and other tools and placing them in the bucket, “Someone will be by later to inspect your incision. Then we’ll see about moving you and I’m sure Dr. Pearce will want to have a word.” He paused at the door to the room, glancing back at Milo with a mixture of emotions on his face. He looked like he was going to say something else, only to think better of it and walk away. The door closed behind him with a heavy clunk.

The word rang in Milo’s ears.

Incision.

That meant cut.

They had cut him.

But where?

All his limbs were still in place. He still had two eyes, all his teeth, his tongue, his nose, and all the other bits. It didn’t seem like he was missing anything internally (but then, how would he know). It was when he was running the palm of his hand down the front of his hospital gown that he realized something was wrong. His fingers were bumping over lines that weren’t there before, a light tingle of raw pain fresh against the tired edges of his mind as he touched his chest again. 

The beeping of the heart monitor increased.

Hands shaking, Milo gently pushed the blanket aside and curled his fingers around the hem of his hospital gown, still bunched around his knees from the nurse’s earlier work. Milo’s breathing was loud in his ears, rasping over his dry throat as his heart thudded almost painfully against his rib cage. Slowly, fear biting nastily at the heels of his movements, Milo lifted the gown up, exposing the pale, trembling expanse of his thighs, his narrow waist where his hipbones were worryingly visible, and then—

Milo choked, his hands shaking so badly he could barely keep a hold of the gown.

There, dancing delicately over his still slightly-too-shallow stomach, was a hint of something thing and metallic peeping cheekily out at him.

Just tear the bandaid off. Just rip it off, it’s over faster if you just rip it off. Come on, just look. Just look damn it, just look, just LOOK—

Milo looked. 

And he screamed.

* * *

The nurses and doctors who swarmed into Milo’s room at the noise and the alarms of the disconnected heart monitor found an empty hospital bed. Milo was in front of the shallow sink of the bathroom, having managed to drag himself there on his shaking legs, using his IV stand as support. But his trembling hands were now gripping the edge of the basin so tightly his knuckles were white.

His hospital gown was twisted around back to front, the ties on it hastily undone down to his waist so that it hung off one shoulder, exposing the jutting line of his collar bone and the taunt stretch of his neck. His freckles were as faded and pale as the rest of him. But Milo’s eyes were snagged on the precise scar in the shape of a capital “i” across his abdomen. It crossed from just beneath one shoulder, over his sternum, and to the other shoulder, a line down his middle carving him perfectly in two, and coiled over his stomach from hip to hip like an obscene belt. Medical staples pinched his separated skin together, grotesque imitations of body piercings that stamped evenly around the incision, gleaming dully in the bright overhead lights.

Milo’s wild gaze flickered to the reflections of the doctors in the bathroom mirror, “Wh…hn…wh-what…what dh-did you…gh…” He ducked his head towards the sink, exposing the prominent curve of his spine, his breathing heavy as his body jerked, struggling not to throw up, “What did you d-do to me…?”

“It would be best if you returned to your bed—“ One of the nurses began, reaching out to take his arm.

Milo wrenched himself away, tripping backwards until he’d plastered himself against the wall between the sink and the toilet. His chest was heaving, his mutilated skin stretching obscenely against the staples holding him together. Panic glazed his eyes and his voice came out in a broken scream,

“What did you do to me!? WHAT DID YOU DO!? **WHAT DID YOU DO**!?”


	10. The Reunion

Dr. Pearce had him moved back into the glass-walled room.

And Milo made sure to give them hell.

He refused once again to eat the food they gave him, going so far as to dump it on the floor and smear it on the walls, forcing them to clean it up while he sneered at them from behind his muzzle. Not because he wasn’t hungry—he was terribly, gut-wrenchingly hungry—but because he was too angry and hurt to care anymore. It was only when Roland kindly reminded him that if he didn’t start cooperating, they would force feed him that Milo finally relented. But even then he only picked at his food and ate the bare minimum. 

When he’d initially left the hospital room, they had stuck the IV drip in the crook of his elbow. He tore it out viciously and left bloody splatters across the room and another jagged cut to add to his growing collection. They stuck it in his hand and he ripped that one out too, kicking and hitting them when they rushed in to bandage him up. He’d only left the damn thing alone when they’d put it into his neck, too afraid of what it could do to him if he took it out on his own. It made his blood boil to know they’d won that round.

Milo was well beyond being afraid of them anymore. 

What else did he have to fear from them when they had already done their worst?

He spent hours screaming at them from inside his cell; hurling curses and swearing vengeance at the top of his lungs until his legs shook and his body gave out to exhaustion. It scared away some of the weaker staff, sent them skittering away or hunching into their work, avoiding any eye contact at all. It gave him a sick satisfaction to see the flicker of fear on their faces before they ducked out of sight. When he wasn’t screaming or sleeping, he was glaring at them from his cot, wrapped in blankets and scowling at the world, using anger to hide the complicated cesspool of emotional trauma that burned the back of his throat.

The incision on his chest was a state of constant pain.

It throbbed dully, scraping across his senses, always reminding him of what they’d done to him. Wearing a shirt just made it worse, the fabric rubbing against his chest leaving him feeling itching and raw, so he’d stopped putting it on. Even though doing so meant he had to look at what they’d done—seeing the way his flesh was twisted and bunched like stretched taffy against the staples, the angry red of the vivisection lines traced with delicate precision over his thin frame. It turned the hollow pit of his stomach to look at it.

He thought perhaps they’d leave him alone to heal.

They didn’t.

In fact, he was fairly certain that they’d put him under again just to pull out the staples and peel back his skin and poke around inside him some more. He couldn’t remember it happening, only had a vague recollection of straps and a needle and cold, bright lights. But his chest had ached anew the next morning and the sides of the incision were an inflamed and nasty red and he felt disgusted and violated, so they must have done something. Milo wrapped himself in his blankets, pulled them over his head, and stubbornly refused to think about it.

“You’re healing rather slowly,” Dr. Pearce said one day as the doctor’s inspected Milo’s chest. He was perched on the edge of his cot, fingers clenched into the side to stop himself from just punching the staff in the face. Pearce stood over the lot of them, looking down her nose at him as she took notes on her clipboard, “You would be healing faster if you ate proper meals…”

“What did you do to me?” Milo demanded with an angry huff of hot air into his muzzle.

“At last, it speaks!” Roland crowed from the other side of the room. Everyone ignored him.

“We removed it.” Pearce replied without looking up.

“Removed…it?” Milo echoed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Roland make an exaggerated eye-roll gesture.

“Yes. It.” Dr. Pearce repeated. She finally lowered her clipboard and, for the first time since they’d met, she looked pleased with herself, “The parasite that was generating the toxic magical substance. The thing planted inside you by Ness 114-B. The supernatural anomaly we identified as Ness 114-C. We took it out.”

Milo felt sick. 

Not in the feverish way, not in the way that would heal with bedrest and hot soup. But sick in same way he’d felt when he’d realized the Sumneys were trying to replace his dad. Sick because of the awful truth. Sick because there was no denying it now. Sick because the last shred of hope that his hoodie had meant nothing, that all of this had been nothing, was gone.

He wrapped his arms around his middle, suddenly conscious not only of the his shirtless state, but also of the cold, hollow void in the yawning pit of his stomach. That feeling like they’d scraped out the bottom of his stomach, like they’d cut away a chunk of him and left it empty. He’d simply attributed the sensation to his lack of appetite and having to recover from such a grueling surgery. Or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to think about it.

Swallowing hard, Milo forced his voice to work itself past the gnarled ball of thorns in his throat,

“S-so…so if you took that thing out…then that—that means I’m normal, right? That means I’m not a Ness or whatever. I’m normal. So you have to let me go.” Hope fueled anger and desperation as his gaze darted between the staff still hovering over him, “You have to! I’m not a monster! I’m normal! I’m normal so you have to let me go!”

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Pearce gave him a condescending look of bemusement, “We need to monitor whatever lingering affects my still remain in your system. Not to mention, we have no idea how strong your bond is with Ness 114-B and whether or not another parasite could still manifest within you. We also need to monitor your recovery. Performing a vivisection is a last resort for Nonstandard Entities as the majority of them tend not to last.”

“Brat’s too stubborn to die.” Roland grunted and Pearce sent him a warning scowl. He raised his hands and backed off.

“That’s not fair!” Milo yelled, trying to get up only to find himself forced back down by a sudden swarm of nurses, “Lemme go! Hey! I’m cured or whatever so I’m not a magical thing anymore so you can’t keep me here!” He kicked out, snapping his teeth uselessly against the interior of his muzzle, thrashing with what little energy he had. The needle of the IV drip tugged warningly at the side of his neck.

“You are not in charge and you do not make the calls,” Pearce watched with cold disinterest as the nurses pinned Milo to his cot and fed a solution into the drip line. She spoke over Milo’s answering whines, “I don’t know how many times I must explain that you are an unknown and therefore you are dangerous. You will never leave this Facility again.” Milo’s protests turned into shivers of almost-tears as he stared at her, begging one last time for freedom. She returned his pleas with a cold shoulder and a frosty answer,

“You were never human.”

* * *

There was tension bubbling in the Facility. 

Milo could see it in the stiff set of the staff’s shoulders, the way they congregated in little groups and murmured to one another with worried glances. He didn’t quite understand office politics or the ways of the adults, but he knew enough social cues from being in high school to understand that something had everyone on edge. And for once, it didn’t seem to come from him.

No one had performed anything apart from some vitals checks on him in weeks. He still rallied what energy he could muster against them, but it didn’t illicit the usual frustrated responses. Most of the time they were too distracted to bother with him, other times they lashed out or punished him for his defiance. They even forgot to put his muzzle on one night. All of this in addition to the anxious pacing outside of his cell, the way staff were running in and out of the room at all hours of the day, and the tight, aggravated way Pearce was carrying herself had Milo on edge, his hackles raised. 

Snatches of conversation sometimes made their way through the speakers in his cell, fuzzy with static and quiet as whispers,

“—they might actually have a case—“

“—unethical if it was just a host?”

“—released them and dropped all charges—“

“—see the news? I heard that the parents—”

“—has to be something about government protection—“

There were too many pieces missing for him to understand what the words meant. And besides all that he was tired, nearly constantly so, spending most of his days on his cot dozing or asleep. His chest ached and the drip in his neck itched, making him whine and sulk and demand attention he didn’t actually want from these people. His back was still too sore to sleep on and sleeping on one side agitated the needle in his neck, so he was forced to lay on only one side, waking up stiff and sometimes with his arm asleep. It was irritating.

But not quite as irritating as the notion that something was going on and he was being kept out of the loop.

* * *

The Facility had provided him with “approved stimulation and entertainment” again. Which turned out to be boring math or reading workbooks with soft pencils, paperback historical fiction novels, and soft, foam-y blocks to “build towers with”. It was a joke and Milo let them know precisely what he thought of them. But he certainly didn’t reject them.

Milo was drawing sharks over top of a page of math problems in one of the workbooks, his back against the coolness of the glass wall and the book propped on his knees. The sharks weren’t doing anything in particular—just swimming among the numbers, eating a couple plus or minus signs, perhaps gnawing on a figure that looked vaguely like Dr. Pearce—but it was the shape of them that brought Milo comfort. They were his favorite things and their familiar outline brought simple stability to his careening world. 

He’d just put the finishing touches on a shark that was lunging out of the water at a tourist (who looked like Roland), when the door to his cell opened and Dr. Pearce and Roland marched in. Something in the air instantly had Milo on edge and he curled in on himself, shrinking away from the pair. Pearce was thin lipped, her jaw clenched and genuine anger flashing in her eyes. Roland looked as if he was ready to commit murder.

“Up,” Pearce snapped at Milo, “Get up. Now. You’re being moved to another room. The extra security of this chamber is no longer necessary.”

Milo’s dry throat clicked as he swallowed hard, tentatively pulling himself upright and swinging his feet off the bed. A quick glance outside showed him staff members hurrying back and forth, frantically pressing buttons on computers or gathering armfuls of files and running out of the room. Milo gripped his IV stand tightly and heaved himself to his feet, wincing at the twinge of pain that snapped zig-zag down his spine. His knees were shaking by the time he was standing and Pearce was already turning away towards the door. Roland was glaring at Milo with pure contempt and Milo shrank away from him again, hiding behind his IV pole as he slowly shuffled forward. 

“Get a move on,” Roland barked, nudging Milo impatiently and making him trip as he stepped out of the cell door. Milo stumbled, slipping and nearly falling, whimpering at the pressure-pain from Roland’s hand on his sensitive back.

“Some time today,” Dr. Pearce called, waiting farther ahead, her foot tapping on the floor and her expression soured even more. 

Now that he was out of his cell, Milo could hear more people’s voices, ringing from the open door to the rest of the Facility. There was certainly shouting going on, hurried footsteps and sometimes distant crashes. Far more noise than there ever had been before and it made Milo even more nervous. He shuffled his bare feet across the cold tile, breath puffing into his muzzle with the exertion it took for him just to remain upright. Pearce didn’t slow and Roland kept shoving him along when Milo wasn’t moving fast enough for his liking. By the time they’d gotten to a part of the Facility he recognized from his initial stay, Milo was sweaty and shaking and ready to fall over. 

“Shit.” Dr. Pearce cursed and it caught Milo by such a surprise that he nearly tripped over his IV stand, “I left the key card in the office. Stay with 114-A, I’ll be right back.” She whirled away in a flare of white lab coat and was gone.

Roland made a disgusted noise of protest but didn’t move. He glared down the hall after Pearce and then turned his glare on Milo, who shrank away from him. Roland sneered,

“At least you know to be afraid of me. Damn freak.”

“You’re the freak,” Milo wheezed and Roland’s eyes narrowed, “Sicko. Tortures kids.”

“You’re not a kid,” Roland leaned down and jabbed a finger into the staples on Milo’s chest, making him whimper in pain and stumble back against the wall, “You’re a monster. If you used to be human, you’re not anymore, so you’d better remember who’s in charge here before you—“

A bang of doors being thrown open made Roland jerk up, frowning down the hall as a series of thundering footsteps drew closer. One hand closed around the back of Milo’s muzzle, jerking him slightly so that he was between Roland and whatever was coming. Milo slumped in his grip, clutching at his IV pole with numb fingers and shivering as the sweat on his skin cooled and chilled him. More doors banging, followed by shouting, and more running. A wave of nurses suddenly came spilling out of an adjacent hallway, saw Milo and Roland, and froze.

Then a bunch of people in uniforms burst in and the hallway suddenly felt incredibly crowded.

There was noise everywhere, a wall made of layers of shouting and stomping and curses and flesh being hit with fists or batons. Roland hauled backwards on Milo’s muzzle, momentarily smothering him as he dragged them both against the wall and out of the main fray. Milo watched with wide, frightened eyes as nurses were cuffed and dragged away, or they ran or fought, uniformed forces chasing them down and quelling their rebellion. 

A large shape suddenly exploded through the hysteria with a raw snarl of rage. A towering bear of a man with fury and distress lining his expression in thunderclouds. He shoved a nurse down, sending the smaller man tumbling head over heels out of his way, and started shouldering his way through the crowd, his fiery gaze flickering to and fro. 

Then he saw Milo.

All at once, the hard edges and angry angles melted out of his body. Tears welled into his eyes and he staggered on his feet, something like grief and happiness and horror written all across his features.

It took Milo far longer than he would ever admit to recognize who it was.

“MILO!”

Dan shouting his name absolutely shattered him. 

Milo let out a strangled cry and tried to launch himself forward into his father’s arms, one hand reaching out desperately while the other clutched at his IV pole. But in his excitement, he’d forgotten about Roland. The man yanked back savagely on Milo’s muzzle, heaving him backwards and pulling him away down the hall with a snarl. Milo screamed, kicking his feet out clawing at Roland’s hand, trying to get away, trying to get to his dad, trying with every little tiny bit of strength he could muster to be free. Roland only gave him a vicious shake, rattling Milo’s frail body so that his legs collapsed underneath him and he crashed into his IV stand, nearly toppling it to the floor.

That would have been enough to get Milo away if it wasn’t for one thing.

Daniel Fuller.

Dan let out a roar of fury that put a lion to shame and charged down the hall without care of who he crushed underfoot. Roland saw him coming and backpedaled furiously but it was too late. Dan plowed into them, tearing Roland’s grip away and smashing the man into the floor. Milo cowered back against the wall, watching with an odd combination of horror, relief, and satisfaction as Dan launched himself at Roland and threw his entire weight into a savage punch, right into the doctor’s face. Blood splattered from Roland’s nose and mouth and he crumpled to the floor, a puppet with its strings cut, motionless.

Breathing heavily through clenched teeth, Dan slowly turned around to attend to Milo, the stiff rage relaxing out of his body as he took him in. Tears welled in his eyes and he knelt down, arms wide to wrap Milo up, only to hesitate as his gaze darted over Milo’s narrowed chest, over the fragile frame, the raw red skin warped underneath too many medical staples. 

Milo had no such reservations.

He threw himself into Dan’s arms with a loud sob, pressing his muzzled face into his dad’s chest, his shaking fingers curled as tightly as possible into the soft fabric of Dan’s shirt. And Dan hugged him back. Warmth and safety wrapped around Milo in a familiar embrace and he sobbed, sagging in his dad’s arms, breath hitching, legs nearly giving out underneath him at the relief, the affection, and the sensation of home that flooded through him. He cried into Dan’s shirt, holding on tighter when he felt Dan shift and turn underneath him.

“Jake!” Dan’s voice was loud in his ear but, god, he didn’t care, it was such a comfort just to hear him, “Jake! Sage! It’s Milo! Guys! Guys, it’s him! We got him! We got him back! It’s him!”

Milo stood on his tip toes, looking over Dan’s shoulder enough to see—

Jake, tripping his way through the thinning crowd, his eyes wide, looking more drawn and tired than ever before. One hand held tightly to Sage, who looked equally exhausted, their ears pinned back and their shoulders hunched as they ducked away from the swarm of strangers around them. Milo saw them and made a long, drawn out noise that might have been a word at some point but had gotten so flooded with emotion that nothing in the english language could capture exactly what he was feeling. He reached a hand over Dan’s shoulder, fingers pale and shivering. Tears flooded down Jake’s face and he ran to join them, pulling Sage along with him, nearly falling over as he dropped beside Dan to hug the little boy still in the man’s arms. Sage fell on top of all three of them with a gasping sob, couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with their hands as they ran shaky fingers down Dan’s shoulder, across the back of Jake’s neck, cupped Milo’s face despite the muzzle, eventually just ducked their head into their little familial cluster and made a noise that was part anger and part pain and all parts love and grief and happiness.

Milo cried. He cried harder than he had his entire time in the Facility. He grabbed at his dads, at his apa, afraid to let them go for even a second. Afraid that if he let them go, they would vanish.

Fingers scrabbled over the back of his head and jerked back in fright, only to realize it was Dan, trying to undo the muzzle. Dan’s hands were shaking and he was sniffling and fresh tears kept running down his face but that didn’t stop him from trying. He tugged gently at the straps, tried to undo the locking mechanism, his movements getting more and more frantic.

“I can’t—“ Dan’s voice hitched in a sob, “I can’t get it off!” He gripped the straps in both hands, as if intending to try and tear it off. Milo whined at the pressure on his face, the bottom of the muzzle cutting into his jaw, and Dan released him quickly, “It—it looks like it needs a key! Where’s the key!? Where’s the key!?”

Dan rocketed to his feet and stomped over to Roland who was still sprawled on the floor. Dan grabbed a fistful of the other man’s shirt and hauled him up with a snarl, “Where’s the key to muzzle!? Where’s the damn key so I can get that muzzle off of my son!?”

Roland’s face was a mess, already swollen and bruising, his jaw looked crooked and blood stained his teeth. When he spoke, it was garbled and disjointed and difficult to understand,

“Gh…h….Ph…Ph’ear’th…Orchi’h….Peh…Pear’th…offif hive…”

Dan dropped him unceremoniously back to the floor and Roland groaned in pain. A uniformed person approached, glanced at Dan who simply glared, and then went about dragging Roland across the floor and out of the way.

“Jake, stay here with Milo.”

“Dan—“

“I said, stay here.”

Sage got halfway to their feet but the look Dan sent them over his shoulder stopped them. Milo’s fingers wove into the silky fur at the end of their tail and they sank back down to their knees, putting an arm around Jake and pulling Milo close. He tucked himself gratefully into their baggy sweater, shivering with too many emotions and so much exhaustion. 

“I’ll be right back.” Dan’s voice was a growl and he took off down the hall before anyone could say anything else. He was a man with a purpose and god save anyone who tried to stop him or get in his way. The remaining three watched him go, clutching at one another, until he disappeared around the corner. 

Silence stretched among them for a long moment as the uniformed officers and the nurses vanished from the hall. It was only the three of them. 

Then Sage made a strangled noise, Milo felt fingertips brush over his back, making him shudder, “Fuck, I wanna kill someone. How could—he’s just a kid, I don’t—people suck.”

“I know,” Jake said in a soft, hoarse voice. He leaned forward, wrapping his arms around Sage and tucking Milo into a warm, dark, safe space between their two bodies. Milo shifted a little, settling down in Sage’s lap but turning so he could look up at Jake. When his dad looked back down at him, Milo could see the heartbreak in Jake’s eyes, “Oh, baby shark, I wish we could’ve…we did everything we could as fast as we could and I don’t…it wasn’t…” Tears flooded anew and Jake squeezed his eyes shut, one hand automatically coming up to smooth over the top of Milo’s head, “Your hair…your hair…they took it, they took it, they took you, they just—how could they!? Milo, my god, we fought so hard and—Milo, my brave boy, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, Milo, I’m so sorry. We should have worked harder, we should have gotten you out sooner, I’m so, so sorry, we—“

“Dad,” Milo’s voice cracked and Jake froze, Sage stiffening beneath Milo and their tail twitching in his grip, “’s not…not your fault. I’m not—I don’t…blame you. I…I’m so…” His voice caught, breathing hitched, his eyes burning with a fresh wave of tears, 

“I knew you would come for me.”

That made them cry hard all over again.

When Dan came back with bruised knuckles and a key in his hand, he found Milo swallowed in Sage’s sweater, the sleeves dragging on the floor and the hem reaching past his knees. It reminded Dan of when Milo had been small, barely four, tottering around with his shark tail dragging on the floor and a big smile on his face. It made something inside him twist with love and pain and he ran the rest of the way, skidding on his knees down the hall to stop beside them. Milo immediately grabbed him, pressing himself into Dan’s lap, nearly toppling his IV stand.

“Easy, little shark, hold on,” Dan murmured, “Let me get this off.” His hands were still shaking as he unlocked the muzzle and pulled it off, hurling it away with as much strength as he could muster. When he looked back down, Milo was beaming up at him through another wave of tears.

“I wanna go home.”

* * *

Dan carried Milo out of the Facility. 

Wrapped in Sage’s oversized sweater with the hood pulled low over his face, tucked against Dan’s broad chest with the sound of his dad’s heartbeat in his ears. Jake kept one hand on Milo’s leg, his other occupied with Sage’s hand, their fingers intertwined, keeping the four of them connected. And as they stepped out the front doors and into the afternoon sunlight, for the first time in what felt like years, Milo felt safe. 

Milo didn’t care about the camera flashes or the hungry reporters being held back by the police or the military or whatever. He didn’t care about the brisk autumn chill that nipped at his toes and his cheeks. He didn’t care about his old hoodie, lost somewhere in the depths of the Facility, probably never to be seen again. He didn’t care about how weak he was or how tired he felt or how much dull pain still thudded through his body. He didn’t care about what the future might hold or what sort of bridges might need to be crossed.

All Milo cared about was the smell of fresh, clean, unfiltered air. All he cared about was the bright and wonderful glow of sunlight and how it burned through the changing leaves like fire. All he cared about was the warmth and love and safety of the arms around him, of the gentle reassurances and tender kisses and tear-filled smiles. All he cared about was the hand on his knee, comforting and real and grounding. All he cared about was the familiar scent of cinnamon and candle flames and that vague sting of ozone from a well worn sweater.

All Milo Pierly-Fuller cared about was that he was finally home.


End file.
